Reforming in progress - Special Education Teacher Delaware County Intermediate Unit Employee Review

I am a contracted early intervention speech-language pathologist working for DCIU in community preschools. I absolutely love it! I have complete control over my own caseload and schedule, which is so refreshing. There is so much support from service coordinators, administrators, OTs, PTs, and special instructors. The preschoolers and preschool teachers that I work with are the highlight of my day- they are all wonderful. As a contractor, I am so appreciative of the fact that I still get paid for absenses during scheduled therapy sessions. I also love that I can work over breaks and on in-service days to provide make-up time, as this is so beneficial for the kids I see with comp-ed plans.

It feels like there is too much writing required of SLPs during IEPs and re-evaluations when we are "the primary". Our evaluations take the longest to administer and the communication section requires the most writing out of any of the disciplines, so it is feels overwhelming and time consuming to have to gather and write information for SI, OT, and PT sections as well.

A lot of the coworkers I had were great. But most of them ended up leaving to work somewhere where they weren't treated like dirt.

Revolving door of supervisors who demand things of you and don't appreciate you. The only thing that kept me at this job was having control over my caseload and schedule. Then new management came in and told me I had to take any new cases they gave me. They also reassigned kids I'd been working with for years to other therapists. These were children who I had great rapport with as well as with their parents. It was in the best interest of those children to stay assigned to me. I believe they did this because I pissed them off by refusing cases they assigned to me when I was at my max capacity. Turnover is very high.