Interview with Jean Blosser, Vice President of Therapy Programs and Quality, Progressus Therapy

Schreiber: Good morning Jean. Thank you for talking with me this morning. You are the Vice President of Therapy Programs and Quality for Progressus Therapy. Perhaps you could tell our readers a little bit about your background.Blosser: Well I've been in the profession a very long time; over 37 years

Schreiber: Good morning Jean. Thank you for talking with me this morning. You are the Vice President of Therapy Programs and Quality for Progressus Therapy. Perhaps you could tell our readers a little bit about your background.

Blosser: Well I've been in the profession a very long time; over 37 years. I started out as a school-based clinician in Ohio. As a matter of fact, I started the very first speech-language program in one of the communities in Ohio outside of Akron. And then I moved into the University of Akron. My first position was a clinical supervisor, and then I moved into positions of professor, director of the speech and hearing center, and department chair. Eventually my professional career took a turn where I was working in central administration positions, such as Provost and Dean, in the university setting. About three years ago, I gravitated away from university administration and into the position that I have now, which is Vice President of Therapy Programs and Quality for Progressus Therapy. This has been one of the most rewarding and fun positions that I've ever held.

Progressus Therapy is a national company with over 15 years of success in providing speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists for school districts around the country. In 2002, Progressus was acquired by Educate, Inc., the parent company for Sylvan Learning Center, Hooked on Phonics, Reading Rainbow, and other educational organizations. I came about the position in an interesting way. Educate, Inc.'s home base is in Baltimore. I read that Educate had acquired Progressus Therapy in the local paper. I thought "Well this is kind of interesting that Sylvan has acquired a company that has speech-language pathologists; I had better look into that." I started exploring what had taken place with the acquisition, what it meant, what it was all about, and what sort of things they planned to do to develop the business. It was interesting that a company that focuses on education and reading was linking up with a company that provides services to children with language and learning disabilities. I've always felt that Sylvan has the right idea about how to teach children to read one that has tutorials and connects with parents. I thought the merger would open doors to some very interesting possibilities. After reading the article, I started contacting people just to find out a little bit more about it, and one thing led to another and together, we created my job.

Schreiber: What a good matchyour background and expertise matched with a company you admired.

Blosser: It is! The neat thing about the position is that it enables me to do things that I liked at the universityto focus my attention and research on school-based issues and actively engage in an administrative and leadership role and it also enables me to work closely with clinicians, which I've always loved to do. It also has increased my opportunity to be connected with the schools. All of my previous research and writing have been about best practices in school-based service delivery. I was amazed that all these pieces came together in amazing ways and I could work only two and a half miles from my home in Baltimore's Inner Harbor area.

Schreiber: It sounds like it was meant to be.

Blosser: It was meant to be.

Schreiber: And so Progressus was born and is now a leading provider of school-based and early intervention services.

Blosser: That's right. After Educate, Inc. acquired Progressus, we began focusing fully on school-based service delivery. That's one of the places where a critical shortage of speech-language pathologists (SLPs), occupational therapists (OTs), and physical therapists (PTs) is the greatest.

Schreiber: How does Progressus Therapy work with school districts? What kind of partnership arrangements do you have with districts?

Blosser: You used the right word, and that's "partnership." That's one of the aspects that makes us uniquely different from some of our competitors. Right now schools are seeking ways to meet their demands because they have to provide a broad range of special education services. And they're looking for, not only people to do that, but more efficient and more effective ways of doing it. So what we bring to the district, in addition to staff, is a relationship that creates joint efforts to work hand-in-hand to design an efficient and effective way of providing services. But what we do is engage in conversation with the district say the director of special education or the director of speech-language servicesand we'll sit down and brainstorm, not just how many people are needed, but we also ask if the district would like to deliver services in a different way. Would they like to try and institute a more flexible scheduling pattern such as the 3:1 model? Would they like a speech-language pathologist to work in collaboration within the reading program? We have developed some model programs throughout the country that we can point to and say "Look, we've figured out a way to better prepare teachers to work with the speech-language pathologist or the OT or the PT to work with kids in a different way," which is not necessarily to structure the caseload in the same way that the district is accustomed to structuring it. When schools partner with us in that way, we feel we're reaching our potential and the district is reaching its potential with us.

Schreiber: So the service delivery models you provide are flexible; going beyond the classic pull-out program model?

Blosser: We encourage districts to think beyond pull-out even though 80% of the SLPs in the schools are still using pull-out approaches. And that's not to say that's a bad thing to do, it's just that there are other approaches to service delivery that people are trying and finding successful in reaching children in different ways.

Schreiber: So as a company, you recruit speech-language pathologists who would like to work in the schools?

Blosser: We say that we want them to have a passion for working [in the schools].

Schreiber: A passion, I like that. So you hire and issue the contract for the speech-language pathologists. You do the recruiting.

Blosser: Right, we do the recruiting. We do national recruiting.

Schreiber: And then you do the hiring?

Blosser: Yes. We are very comprehensive; we do the initial introductory interview. One of our recruiters does that and then sorts out whether the interviewee is interested in working in the schools and where geographically he or she is interested in working. Is the interviewee credentialed or would he or she have to get credentials for that state? So that's the first step in the pathway. Then we have one of our clinic coordinators who is located in a particular region do what we call the "clinical interview." And that coordinator looks at the interviewee's strengths and needs; and interests and background experiences; and then discusses with the SLP the districts that are within that region with similar needs. We then jointly decide if the two would be a match. For example, if somebody is really interested in working with children with autism and they have experience for that, well we may have some districts that are seeking people to work with children who have autism. So we try to link that person with that district.

After the clinical interview, our client partnership team steps in and gets in contact with the school district to say we have somebody to present to them. And the district either accepts them directly from us, or sometimes, depending on their procedures, will interview the person themselves.

Once people are hired, we surround them with guidance and mentoring and assistance. Our therapist coordinators are available to help the newly hired people, to make sure that benefits such as their professional development funds are available, that their insurance is handled, and they're not having personal or professional issues. If they're having any personal issues, we try to help them with that. We have regional critical coordinators give guidance in professional areas too. They help them understand the district's rules and procedures and expectations.

At the national level, I oversee a program called the Career Launch Program and that's for people who are just recently graduated from a university or are moving from a medical or healthcare setting to the school setting. We provide a very close mentorship. We give them a mentor and they work very closely with this mentor to help understand all the rules and school procedures and expectations that help prepare them for assessment, intervention, parent training, collaborating with teachers, and other job responsibilities.

Schreiber: So what would you say to a recent graduate in speech-language pathology about why they should talk to a recruiter from Progressus? What are the advantages of being employed through Progressus Therapy?

Blosser: We offer people a broad number of opportunities. I think we present an option, a viable option for employment choice. For a person who wants to work in a particular location, we can help them sort of figure out that location. We have a lot of students from the east who want to move west. And for them, it's very overwhelming. How do you figure out San Diego? How do you figure out Los Angeles? So we help them decipher all of the information so they can make a decision about their career. And of course with our local critical coordinators, the newly hired person can talk to the coordinator about what it would be like to work in a district. We link our therapists to a community of therapists. So if they move some place new, they'll have groups of professionals they can relate to, get together with, share "war stories" with, and party with, etc.

I think the thing that comes out the strongest for a person who is newly graduating is that they're entering a new world of service delivery the school setting which is quite overwhelming. There are federal laws. There are state laws. There's complexity in terms of caseload and demographics, especially in the bigger cities. When we offer this mentoring and guidance and support, it forms a community around them. If they had just gone it alone, and looked for a job on their own, they tend to get a little overwhelmed because they're one of a couple of hundred clinicians in a district. They do begin to feel very overwhelmed. I would say what draws people to us mostly is that we do come through with this resource of support.

Schreiber: Do you have a system for helping the new grad find a match for their clinical fellowship year?

Blosser: Yes. First of all, we go beyond the minimal guidelines that are established for the clinical fellowship. We provide an experienced mentor. We provide that mentor with guidance on how to mentor. As you know, your website www.speechpathology.com has at least two or three courses on supervision and mentoring of CFYs. (Lisa O'Connors Article) Two of those courses are taught by Progressus speech-language pathologist, Lisa O'Connor. And then all throughout the year both the mentor and the mentee receive materials from me and others in the Progressus organization to stimulate them to talk about certain topics: topics like how to put a schedule together, how to deal with concerned parents, how to prepare for an IEP meeting, how to do a classroom observation, things like that. Through activities such as these, we get them through their fellowship year. It's really not just a drop in and observe kind of thing; it's really a much more guided instruction sort of mentoring.

Schreiber: Jean, how do your salary and benefit packages work? Are they competitive with a district's package?

Blosser: Yes, our package is competitive with the district's. Again, we have to keep going back to the fact that there's this huge critical shortage and districts are not just recruiting for a speech-language pathologist. The district is recruiting for math teachers, science teachers, and reading teachers, and everything else. So when the district is recruiting, they have multiple hats on because they're seeking different people. When we recruit, we're recruiting for SLPs, OTs, and PTs. We have a huge database of people that have expressed interest in, let's say Los Angeles, or we have relationships that we've built with different universities and so forth. So we can try and do a concerted effort on the district's part to find somebody for them. We're competitive in that we can offer a salary that is very close to what the SLP would be making in a district, plus insurance benefits, and a 401K that they can participate in. In addition, the SLPs will get this mentoring and support and a professional development fund they can use for advancing their own skills and qualifications and to keep up with their continuing education requirements. We have partnership relationships with several businesses, such as the partnership we have with you www.speechpathology.com, that allow us to provide opportunities for continuing education.

And districts get concerned that it costs extra to use a company like us to recruit a clinician and to contract with us. But we had an outside study done that revealed when the district adds up their recruiting costs, their office costs, their administrative costs, their supervisory costs, and the costs of their benefits, the overall cost is about the same. If you just look at everything it takes to have an employee work at a school district, the cost is very close to the same for the district.

Schreiber: That's interesting. As you point out, a real advantage for young graduates is that they can choose where to live you're that opportunity to explore the worldand they have support while doing so.

Blosser: We're in literally every major city in the west, the southwest, the east coast, Florida, Texas, Chicago, and so forth. We like it when students graduating are sowing their oats a little bit and they want to get out and see the world, but they still want to be protected a little. So we try and do both. We try to help them find and explore that world but feel safe while they're there because they have this local community to support them.

The thing that we find with people recently graduating is that within their first five years, some of them are likely to marry and some of them get bored in one place and want to go to another place. They have a baby and they want to just work part-time or relocate back closer to their home. And we can help facilitate all of those stages in their career. We are not a traveler's company. In other words, we work with districts as partners. They need someone to fill a position for the school year; we want to fill the position for the school year. We try to keep people in a position for the school year. If they want to move, then we help them move to another city. If it's a city where we don't currently have services, we still try to find a district for them to go to. We work with them. We want to be their employer throughout their careers so we do a couple things to help that. One is we try to understand where they are in their life and what their needs are professionally and personally. And then we try to stay on top of that to help facilitate their move. And we've had people leave the company; they leave on great terms and come back two years later because their life has changed again. We encourage them to supervise or serve as a mentor because that gives them professional growth experience.

Schreiber: So SLPs have an opportunity to advance with Progressus?

Blosser: Yes, our clinical coordinators split their time between management and direct service delivery. All are experienced clinicians. They still work in the field part of their week and part of their week they do clinical management. They do training in their region and they are liaisons with their districts. And then we have therapist coordinators in our central office. And a therapist coordinator, again, is more related to the human resources kind of issues. As our clinic coordinator positions become available, we make sure SLPs find out about the opportunities so they can apply. And as we continue to grow, these opportunities continue to open. We anticipate that in the next year or so we're going to need more people to supervise our clinical fellows and then more people to fill these clinical management positions.

Schreiber: And to get more information on Progressus or to talk with a recruiter, what would you suggest?

Blosser: I think an SLP might start with our website www.progressustherapy.com, which tells a lot about us. And there's a place on the home page to click to complete an online application, which is to get your contact information and upload your resume. Or they can call us at 800-892-0640, ext. 203. And that gets them to the initial placethe recruiter. And with that we start sorting out on all those questions about where you want to be, and if we're there, and if we're not there, and some suggestions we might have. We've got great positions throughout the country, for example, there's an enormous need in Las Vegas right now

Schreiber: The Clark County school district is growing very rapidly.

Blosser: Yes, Clark County is the fastest growing school district in the country. And they are opening autistic classes at an unbelievable rate. We also have great programs that are unique to Mount Diablo, California, where our occupational therapists work in the classrooms with the teachers. We have response to intervention (RTI) materials that all of our therapists receive that help them work with teachers. We emphasize the benefits of partnering with teachers and making recommendations to teachers about how to help kids with disabilities in the classroom. So we have lots and lots of exciting projects underway.

Blosser: And if you are at our website www.progressustherapy.com, you'll find information about our Career Launch Program and our employee intranet where we have a lot of resources.

Schreiber: And you have recruiters at national conventions, such as ASHA and ASHA Schools Conference, and at some of the larger state conferences?

Blosser: Yes, we're always at ASHA and we'll be at the Ohio, Texas, California, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania state conferences. We also advertise frequently in Advance magazine.

Schreiber: Jean, thank you for taking the time this morning to tell us about Progressus Therapy. I think you provide excellent opportunities for our profession.