The first full week of May is designated as Licensed Employee Appreciation Week. At Clackamas ESD alone, we have at least 20 types of licensed jobs, with many variations in those positions. These are people who have completed higher education and earned licenses to be certified to teach students, lead continuing education training for staff, serve as social skills specialists, and provide speech, physical and occupational therapy within Clackamas ESD programs and the school districts we serve.
This Licensed Employee Appreciation Week, we’re highlighting a few of our approximately 185 licensed staff members and contractors to provide a peek into the diverse ways this large group of employees lives our mission of service. We appreciate our entire licensed team and the meaningful work they do.
Chan MacDonald is a speech-language pathologist in Clackamas Education Service District’s early intervention program. He supports language skills development in children from birth to three years old. Support includes helping children expand their vocabulary and improve their syntax so they can better express themselves, refine their articulation and reduce stuttering so they are better understood, and improve listening and social skills so they are better able to connect with others.
As anyone who has spent time with young children knows, working with toddlers presents unique challenges that inform how Chan approaches his work.
“The challenge in working with young children is motivating child participation,” says Chan. “I like to say that I get paid to play, play being the primary vehicle for learning for kids. How can we structure a play routine the child is doing right now and make it an opportunity to learn new concepts and target particular words? How can we play this game and support the child’s ability to take turns? Because that’s what communication is; it’s taking turns.”
But only part of speech therapy for young children involves working directly with the child. Our early intervention speech-language pathologists deliver their speech therapy services in children’s homes so they can coach the family and ensure the child is experiencing a language-rich environment in their household.
“When working with young kids, facilitating the parent-child interaction and ensuring that it’s adequate for skills development is so important,” Chan explains. “In addition to doing home visits, I also go to local Early Head Start classrooms and consult with the teaching staff to support the skills development of kids in those settings.”
When a child doesn’t have a rich vocabulary or has trouble following directions, Chan often asks parents to think about how often they use vague words such as “it,” “this,” “that” and “here.”
“All those words can mean any number of things, and if you want the child to understand, you need to be more specific. The next week, the parents will say, “Wow, I’m saying ‘Put it over there’ all the time. I’m never saying, ‘Place the cup on the table.’ I would say, by design, 75 percent of my job is parent coaching because I want to make sure that when I leave the home, they’ve learned a strategy that they can practice to support the child’s development when I’m not there.”
Chan finds inspiration in helping the children and families he works with, but he’s driven by his love of language, too. He earned his bachelor’s degree in linguistics and worked as a coordinator for a foreign exchange student program before becoming interested in a career in speech pathology. He explored the field by volunteering at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital for a year, then applied for Portland State University’s Speech and Hearing Science graduate program. He completed his final year practicum at Clackamas ESD and accepted a speech-language pathologist position with the agency after graduation. Nearly six years later, he’s still helping people and expanding his skills at Clackamas ESD.
“I speak English, French and German and studied many languages, from Chinese to Turkish to Italian. Over the course of my time at Clackamas ESD, I developed my Spanish language skills by working directly with families,” Chan shares. “This year, I passed the Spanish proficiency test and am qualified to be a Spanish language provider. I’m so proud to support families directly in English and Spanish.”
Chan also finds pride in seeing how helping children better communicate improves their relationship with their families.
“It’s rewarding to see the transition from the parent just being someone that meets a child’s needs to being someone the child has a close bond with,” Chan comments.
Chan recalls working with one young boy with a motor speech disorder called apraxia of speech. Children with apraxia of speech might be able to laugh or cry reflexively but struggle to use their voices willfully to make sounds or speak. “While we were also supporting his development of verbal speech, I coached the child and his family on using an augmentative communication device. This little kid was really sharp, and within a couple of weeks, he was telling jokes on his tablet!” Chan says with a smile.
