Many Miss. schools lack good speech therapists

Almost half of Mississippi's 152 school districts don't have a staff member fully qualified to help students with speech-related problems, and that shortage that may be reflected in other schools around the country. In Mississippi, "about 150 speech and language clinicians are working under emergency licenses in 72 school districts," Marquita Brown of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports. "Emergency licenses for speech therapy are issued to those with a bachelor's degree. Full certification requires a master's degree with the clinical experience that goes with it."

"Some speech therapists say someone with only a bachelor's degree likely has no clinical experience and, thus, no training to diagnose underlying abnormalities behind a speech problem," Brown writes. Undergraduate students studying communicative disorders have little direct contact with students. School superintendents say its difficult to recruit speech therapists with master's degrees because they can earn almost twice as much money in the private sector. "So where would you go? A $35,000 job or a $70,000 job? It's a no-brainer," Suzie Rosser, president of the Mississippi Speech-Language Hearing Association, told Brown.

Rosser suggested forgiving student loans to speech therapists who work in hard-to-staff areas. Four Mississippi state colleges -- Jackson State, Mississippi University for Women, the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Mississippi -- have graduate speech-language programs, but admit a limited number of students each year. "It's a matter of supply and demand," Stephen Handley, superintendent of Hinds County Schools, told Brown. "We have the demand, but the supply is not there." (Read more)