Education is constantly evolving to meet the unique needs of students and educators, and in today’s digital era, teletherapy has emerged as a game-changer. Let’s explore the top four reasons why schools nationwide are opting for remote student support services.
1. Fill Critical Service Gaps
School districts today use teletherapy services to support their onsite therapists and extend service capacity. By supplementing onsite staff, teletherapy can help prevent staff burnout by ensuring therapists have more manageable caseloads.
Teletherapy can help solve care equity and accessibility issues in underserved communities, too. When schools are unable to provide care because of regional gaps in clinical expertise, or an inadequate staffing pipeline, students ultimately suffer developmental consequences. By engaging remote clinicians, these schools can effectively cover staffing gaps and curate their support based on students’ goals, needs, and ethnolinguistic backgrounds.
2. Efficiently connect students with specialists
Students may not be able to attend traditional school due to illness, injury, or disability. Teletherapy helps overcome these logistical barriers by giving students the option to participate in therapeutic sessions from their own homes, since most students simply need an internet connection, a video camera, and a microphone. Because teletherapy allows clinicians to offer their services remotely, it also reduces daily commuting and leaves more time for student engagement.
3. Engage students effectively
Teletherapy sessions are typically delivered one-on-one or in small groups. With teletherapy, clinicians can easily individualize sessions to meet students’ goal areas, interests, and developmental abilities. As tech-natives, many students today enjoy engaging with others virtually, and they also enjoy the interactive online games clinicians incorporate into their lessons.
4. Support students with diverse needs
One of the most common misconceptions about providing special education services via teletherapy is that it’s not a successful model for students with more significant needs. With the appropriate onsite support, even students with more severe challenges can thrive with this model of service delivery. In fact, teletherapists have successfully provided therapy for students in early childhood and preschool settings as well as for students who are non-verbal and require support from both low and high-tech AAC systems.
How Presence can help
With over 6 million teletherapy sessions completed since 2009, Presence is a leader in providing speech-language therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral services, mental health counseling, and psychoeducational services online. The Presence clinical network has 2,000+ qualified SLPs, OTs, school psychologists, and licensed clinical social workers with school-based experience providing services to school districts across the country.
A partnership with Presence can help to address staffing shortages, allowing schools to fulfill student needs and IEP service delivery requirements. For more information about how our school partners and students are benefiting from Presence teletherapy services for speech-language therapy, occupational therapy, and behavioral and mental health therapy, check out our School Success Stories.
If you’re interested in learning more about what teletherapy has to offer, and in particular what Presence can do for your school district, schedule a free consultation today.
