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When going through the Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) program at Salus and being taught about doing bilingual assessments, Emily Swavely, MS ‘17, remembers thinking to herself, “I will never have to do this.”
It’s lucky she took those lessons to heart because that opinion turned out to be a slight miscalculation on her part. After graduating from Salus, Swavely — a native of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, who earned her undergraduate degree in communication science and disorders at West Chester University — moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to experience life outside the Philadelphia area.
She secured a position in the Fulton County School District, an area that includes Atlanta and its surrounding areas. While there, she worked with students from kindergarten through eighth grade, which offered her a variety of different settings with a different student population at each site.
That’s where the bilingual assessments would come in handy.
“What I didn’t realize about Atlanta before I moved there is that it’s a very cultured city,” said Swavely. “The majority of the students that I worked with were bilingual who spoke Spanish. They have a big Hispanic population down there, as well as a very large Nigerian population.”
In addition to her time with the Fulton County School District, she would also work for a private practice part-time, where she was able to dive deeper into working with medically fragile children, as well as run a social skills summer camp program for kids with autism and/or shyness.
While her two years in Atlanta provided her with a well-rounded professional experience, Swavely decided — right in the middle of a pandemic and because a family member had developed health issues — to quit her job and move back to the Pottstown area where she now works as a speech therapist at an elementary school in the Owen J. Roberts School District.
“Not only was it hard, and still is hard, adjusting to a new district, its policies and a new state’s standards, but also during the quarantine where some of my kids are in person and some are online,” she said. “I keep saying lately that I’m just ready for it to be the next school year so that I know the kids and we’re back to normal a little bit.”
Fortunately, Swavely was in the University’s inaugural SLP class that started in 2015, and laid the foundation for her to meet the challenges she faced as a professional.
“It was interesting because we were all on the same journey together. The professors, the clinical supervisors, we were all kind of learning at the same time,” she said. “As much as they were guiding us, we were also guiding them with the questions we had. We all formed a community and a great team to get through it.”
What gave her the edge over speech therapists from other universities, she believes, was the clinical training she received.
“We were in the clinical facility – the Speech-Language Institute – right away. Now that I am in the professional world, I realized that my life revolves around being in the clinic setting, so just getting that extra year of clinical experience that we were put in is very critical,” said Swavely. “There’s never enough time to learn as much as you can or as much as you need to, so being able to work along with those other therapists at the same time that extra year really helped us prepare not only for the real world, but also in our classes by seeing those hands-on examples.”
Before the pandemic, Swavely loved going out with friends and enjoyed exploring Atlanta and the cultural possibilities it offered. Now that she’s back in Pennsylvania, most of her social interactions have virtually shut down because she is at school and around kids, so she must be extra careful when going out in public.
As a result, she picked up the hobby of cooking and well as working with her father on renovating her home while she was between jobs.
Swavely is happy with where she’s at now professionally, but does think about her future as a speech therapist.
“I see the benefits of working for a school district, and maybe this coming summer, I can also add working for a private practice to that, just for a different challenge during the summer,” she said. “But we’ll see where that goes as the pandemic continues to unfold. One of my long-term goals, though, would be to be the lead therapist of the school district.”
