MORE THAN 20 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE AS A SPEECH PATHOLOGIST
Stephanie has been a Speech and Language Pathologist for the past 20 years. She has worked in a variety of settings to include, hospitals, B-3 and schools systems and now private practice, Her practice is located in Marlborough, CT.. She provides therapy to a wide range of children with a variety of diagnoses to include, Apraxia, Autism, Feeding Disorders, Articulation and Language Disorders. Stephanie is PROMPT and oral motor trained. This training makes her work with children who have Apraxia and Feeding Disorders even more effective.
She began working with children with significant speech and speech and language disorders when she was a paraprofessional in a CT preschool program. This job prompted her to continue her schooling and go to graduate school at the University of DC. It was at graduate school that Stephanie learned to see each child as an individual. Stephanie's training to improve feeding and swallowing skills started in graduate school when she worked in a hospital setting for both adults and children.
Part of Stephanie's therapy, involves seeing the child as an individual and tailoring therapy plans to meet the child's and families needs as well as building a positive relationship with the child. Progress and goal mastery is difficult and slow unless when there is not a positive and fun relationship.
In addition to her degree as a Speech and Language Pathologist, she is also a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. As a BCBA, she is able to consult to families about their child's behaviors. In addition, she is able to make her therapy sessions more effective because she is aware of the best ways to manage behaviors and increase motivation to receive the best results. The combination of these two specialties helps her to work with a wide range of children.
Stephanie completes educational speech and language evaluations. Educationally based evaluations will focus on speech, language, and social communication. Deficits within speech would include areas such as, apraxia, dysarthria, phonological processing and articulation. Evaluations targeting language and social communication would include areas such as pragmatics, following directions, generating stories, making inferences, taking perspectives as well as auditory processing and phonemic awareness. Recommendations for all these areas would include how to incorporate needs into the school environment and recommendations will be made regarding how to move the student forward. Evaluations are mainly completed in the office, however, with special requests or for special circumstances evaluations can be completed at the school. All requests for an assessment and recommendations for pragmatic language and feeding will have school visits/observations. School observations are also available to assist with including speech and language programming into Discrete Trials. All school based feeding evaluations are completed at the school system or within Stephanie's private practice.
Stephanie has a personal understanding of what it is like to raise a child with special needs. She has been on this journey with her daughter for 11 years and is now ready to assist families to understand the journey and help them understand their child's educational program, test results and goals and objectives.