Some speech therapists working in Baltimore County schools say their workloads are unmanageable, causing burnout and impacting student services.
At a school board meeting Tuesday, calls for caseload caps and more in-school planning time were met with cheers from the audience. There’s a nationwide shortage of school speech therapists, making efforts to recruit and retain those professionals even more dire.
But Seanne Herbick, who started serving as the speech-language pathologist at Cockeysville Middle School in August, said the amount of daily work is “simply unsustainable.”
“I've been a speech-language pathologist for 32 years. This has been the hardest year of my career,” Herbick said. “I spent the first months crying in the school hallways, sobbing on my commute home, and dreading each morning. By November, I was prescribed medication just to get through the work day.”
Herbick said she works most evenings and nearly every weekend to keep up with her duties. She said speech therapists are responsible for attending and organizing student IEP meetings, writing lengthy assessment reports, and documenting daily notes for 20-30 students.
“And we are expected to do all of this, plus plan individualized group sessions, with just one hour of planning and documentation time each day,” she said. “The math just doesn't add up.”
Gail Vanderbeek, a speech therapist who splits her time between Gunpowder and Victory Villa elementary schools, said she led a survey earlier this year with help from the county teachers’ union.
It found that over 62% of Baltimore County school speech-language pathologists have caseloads of 61 to 100 students. The average caseload nationwide is 50 students, according to the most recent report from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
“I am stretched between two schools with a much higher caseload, and I struggle to adequately serve my students,” Vanderbeek said. “Our students are missing legally-mandated therapy and consultative services.”
At a press conference Wednesday, Superintendent Myriam Rogers said she hasn’t seen cases where delayed speech-language services have disrupted students’ IEPs. She also said she’s been working with a task force formed earlier this year to address workload issues.
“The first thing we want to add is that we have had no budget cuts to speech language pathologists in BCPS,” she said. “No cuts for this current fiscal year, no cuts planned for FY26.”
Despite the national shortage, Rogers said, the district is on-track to reach its hiring goals for next school year. She said the district also offers virtual speech therapy to bridge in-person gaps — a practice that predates the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All of what I'm sharing with you in no way negates the fact that speech and language pathologists are feeling that there is a whole lot of work to do,” Rogers said. “We certainly recognize that, which is why we stood up this group to collaborate.”
Herbick said harsh workplace conditions are motivating some speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to leave Baltimore County schools.
“Burnout isn't a personal failure,” she said. “It's a systemic problem.”
Vanderbeek said she hoped to see caseloads decrease for next school year. But the recently-released assignments didn’t reflect any change.
Rogers said all county school speech therapists can schedule individual meetings if they’re concerned about next year’s workload. So far, around 40 of 200 SLPs district-wide have taken up the offer, she said.
