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Teaching past the masks, how one district adjusted in COVID-19 era

The Bryan Independent School District shared how they pushed through the pandemic related restrictions that put a mask on learning speech.

BRYAN, Texas — As school districts get back to a place of normalcy, one local district is working through the difficulty COVID-19 brought on three years ago.

While mask wearing became a barrier for communication and the spread of COVID, a speech language pathologist explained how it also put a mask on vital learning skills.

"The virtual therapy was more difficult for me than anything and then when we got back in the classes we had to wear the masks," said Shardell Fluker, Bryan Independent School District speech language pathologist.

Fluker is a speech language pathologist for the district, and says the masks in combination with a change in teaching format has caused major repercussions that will only be evident as we get further away from the end of the pandemic.

"I mean for the kids to learn the sound we have to model the sound and we can't model it with a mask on our face," said Fluker.

While virtual learning was a task in itself for teachers, trying to teach children speech therapy--which requires seeing tongue movements and smiles through a mask--is quite difficult.

"We couldn't see if they were working on sound errors it was like really hard to see if they were using the right placement and that made it really really difficult," she said.

Fluker has been with the district for 25 years. She believes virtual learning was one for the biggest hits to speech and language pathologists.

"The modeling, showing them, and demonstrating production was really difficult. It's really hard for them to produce it," said Fluker. "Do you have your mouth closed, are you putting your teeth on your lip. We couldn't actually demonstrate how to do it." 

Despite a loss of learning from the start, Fluker is hopeful that things can get back on track so there isn't speech disparities in future adults currently in school.

"I'm hopeful that it gets better and we can attract more SLP's to the school setting," Fluker said. "We're going in the right direction."

As referrals from parents recommend BISD speech pathologists like Fluker to help their child with speech, their efforts to still teach are testaments to what all teachers have to do.

"You have to do it you have to do it, we did it and we made it through," Fluker  said.

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