Concord Speech Therapy Company Grows During Pandemic

Concord, CA — Speech at Home was less than a year old when the pandemic struck, bringing lockdowns and the beginning of expansive restrictions. The company was designed specifically to bring speech therapy into the comfortable, familiar environments of their clients’ homes, a concept that is proven to result in better progress, and a concept that, once Covid-19 became so widespread, could not continue as it had before.

“We were responding to a need in the community,” Anna Krajcin, co-founder and Supervising Speech-Language Pathologist of the Speech At Home said. “We were definitely starting to grow, and things were looking really positive, and then the pandemic hit, and no one really wanted us in their homes, so we definitely had to get creative.”

Speech at Home’s initial reaction to not being able to perform their primary function of speech therapy at home was to offer telehealth sessions. But with a service that relies on being able to see the shapes of their clients’ mouths and clearly hear the sounds of the words their clients’ say, Zoom was not the best solution.

“Trying to do speech therapy, where you have to really look at a person’s tongue to get a certain sound, and for the clients to be able to hear,” Krajcin said, “it’s really hard to hear some sounds through Zoom. So that really wasn’t a great option for many of our clients. We lost some clients, and their progress wasn’t great, and then we got creative.”

Speech at Home began moving away from Zoom and moving toward safe, in-person interactions with their clients; they met with their clients outside with masks and face-shields and got to work.

“When it first started, we’re in garages with the garage door open, space heaters,” Stephanie Self, co-founder and practitioner at Speech at Home said. “It was a lot of trial and error, but I was just blown away with how accommodating everyone has been, and how flexible everyone has been.”

Not only did the onset of the pandemic warp Speech at Home’s entire model, but it also forced a shift in how the therapy itself was performed.

“Prior to this happening, we were reliant on bringing a lot of pictures to therapy, and playing structured games, and when those types of materials were taken away, we had to create this new concept for service delivery,” Krajcin said. “That’s what made it more unique. Because everything we’d been trained to do as speech therapists wasn’t feasible anymore. We had the good fortune of being in the homes, and so we were able to utilize the things that were natural for them.”

But the fact that masks had become a necessity for all kinds of social interaction was a difficult hurdle for Speech at Home to overcome.

“It was hard for us to figure out what we were going to do with the mask situation,” Krajcin said. “So much of what we do requires us to see the nonverbal cues of a person. With a mask, you lose half of your face. You’re unable to communicate so much when you’re wearing a mask.”

The solution to this was in the form of clear, see-through face-masks and face shields; items that still protected from possible Covid-19 infection, but items that allowed for the practitioners to see their clients’ faces, and vice versa.

“So many of our kids are working on articulation, where you need the visual cue of what to do with your lips and your tongue,” Self said, “but we found these clear masks and also clear face shields and it’s been working out as good as it can be.”

And in this strange, different environment for the kids they work with, Self and Krajcin restructured their activities to ensure that their clients remain engaged throughout a therapy session.

“You would think a lot of kids would not do well,” Krajcin said, “but there are also a lot of kids who really are doing better. They are more focused and they are more consistent with attendance, now. I would say the pandemic has done wonders for attendance for us.”

With schools in the area closed due to Covid-19 restrictions, many of the schools were unable to adequately provide speech therapy to their students that required it. With parents untrained in the field, and with kids regressing, Speech at Home started to grow.

“We started getting a lot of calls,” Krajcin said. “What we actually found was that so many families were willing to let us take a garage or a spot in the side yard or meet us at a park just so that they could get services. So, we are fully maxed-out, we have a waitlist, and we can’t take on more.”

And now with the possibility of school districts reopening, both Self and Krajcin are already preparing for another potential adaptation with Speech at Home.

“I think there’s definitely another shift coming as schools start to open back up,” Self said. “It will be interesting. We’re pretty flexible, already, the two of us, but we’ve really had to be crazy flexible. Who knows what happens next.”