Pushing Boundaries, Crossing Borders: A New Perspective on School-Based SLPs and MTSS

One of the things I most looked forward to while writing the second edition of my book Multi-Tiered Systems of Support: Implementation Tools for Speech-Language Pathologists in Education was the chance to go out into the field and listen to SLPs’ feedback about their work with the multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) framework. As part of my research for this second edition, I spoke with 32 SLPs from across the country about their involvement with MTSS; their stories of dedication, creativity, and persistence shape every chapter of this new edition. What stood out to me the most was that the SLPs who were able to make the greatest impact through MTSS were those unsatisfied with the status quo and were willing to challenge assumptions and push boundaries to make change happen. Let me share a few of their stories to illustrate what I mean.

I spoke with a team of SLPs at a charter school who noticed a pattern of kindergartners falling through the cracks before they ever qualified for special education, leading to large caseloads in upper grades. They felt students were on caseloads whose language challenges could have been prevented if earlier action had been taken to support them. Despite large caseloads and limited time for prevention-oriented work, they didn't wait for the system to shift but worked to advocate for meaningful change to alter the trajectory they observed. They carefully collected data, made a data-driven case to their principal, and successfully advocated for hiring a new SLP whose sole focus would be prevention-oriented work with kindergarteners. Within a year, special education referrals from kindergarten had dropped significantly, leading to meaningful differences in caseloads. They used that evidence to advocate for yet another hire, this time dedicated to expanding MTSS work into the elementary grades. Speech and language support looks fundamentally different at that school today because those SLPs refused to let students fall through the cracks between general education and special education. They questioned assumptions, pushed boundaries, and drove change through MTSS.

I also spoke with an SLP in a large urban district who inherited an overwhelming caseload of over 70 students in a Title I school where many children struggled with communication. She decided the only way to make a real difference in this challenging setting was to build a culture of collective responsibility for language development, making it everyone's job, not just the SLP's. She started showing up at morning drop-off and afternoon pickup to introduce shared vocabulary learning routines as they transitioned in and out of school, which became a valued and fun part of the school culture. Additionally, she created hallway bulletin boards targeting language concepts, such as prepositions and question words, with prompts teachers could use during transitions while students waited in line, to further support language learning throughout the day. Through these and other efforts, she pushed the boundaries of what it means to be a school-based SLP and where language learning can happen, shifting her school's culture toward a genuine tiered model where all students were supported with speech and language development.

Reflecting on my conversations with school-based SLPs about MTSS, I see these SLPs as examples of dedicated educational professionals who are genuinely committed to deeper MTSS participation and eager to do more. The interest and momentum in prevention-oriented work through tiered support is growing. The Facebook group (Speech-Language Pathologists for MTSS), which I started in 2021 after the publication of the first edition of my book, now has close to four thousand members. The questions that surface there are ones I hear everywhere: How do I get included in data meetings? How do I talk to my administrator about this? How do I justify time spent on students who aren't on my caseload? Am I doing this right?

What is missing, too often, are the conditions that allow that motivation to become a sustainable practice for all school-based SLPs. Organizational conditions that support true MTSS engagement, like those in the stories I just highlighted, are not consistently in place. Not all SLPs work in environments where administrators and teachers have the openness or bandwidth to reimagine what speech-language services can look like. In our field, if we want SLPs to leverage their expertise to build a shared culture of responsibility for speech and language development, we should not have to rely on individual SLPs finding ways to work around barriers through sheer creativity and determination alone. That's an unfair burden and also an incomplete solution to an important issue about SLPs’ roles and impact in schools.

The SLPs I spoke with not only inspired me but also challenged me to do my part in questioning assumptions and pushing boundaries, quite literally, like international ones. The research literature on SLP roles in schools, including my own, has been almost entirely US-centric. But to generate insights that can support real and sustainable change, I think it is time to take a broader international lens. In the United States, speech-language practice in schools is deeply shaped by federal law governing which students receive services, what those services look like, and how funding flows. But what happens when we open our eyes to what is happening in other countries operating under fundamentally different policy constraints? Which challenges are unique to the U.S. context and which reflect more universal tensions in the delivery of speech-language support in schools that cross borders?

In many other countries, school-based SLPs operate without the same federal mandates governing eligibility and funding, giving them considerably more autonomy in structuring services and deciding which students to prioritize, including those who are struggling but haven't been formally identified. Does that difference matter? Can examining how SLPs operate in different policy and cultural environments highlight which barriers are structural and changeable and which run deeper than any single policy fix can reach?

Inspired by SLPs who pushed boundaries in their own practice, I will be traveling to Europe and Canada this fall as part of a research sabbatical to explore these very questions. I will be meeting with SLPs working in places where the legal architecture around special education and speech-language services looks quite different from the American model. I want to know where the challenges overlap and where they diverge. My goal is to begin to understand what conditions have allowed SLPs in other contexts to move further and where they are hitting ceilings of their own. I hope to build a genuine cross-national dialogue and bring back insights that are useful practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and educators who are working every day to find a better way to use limited speech-language resources to support all students.

The SLP who built a new model for her school didn't do it by waiting for permission. The one who put language prompts in the hallways and built a shared culture of language learning didn't do it by staying in her therapy room. What drove both of them was a refusal to mistake perceived barriers for permanent ones, and a commitment to building the evidence that made the case for something better. That same orientation is what this next phase of my work is about. I look forward to crossing some international borders to do it.