Suzanne Sanchez
2:22:07
I can speak to, in our in our conversations with other large school districts, they're all sharing that they are having facing significant challenges around identifying and hiring occupational and especially bilingual speech therapists.
2:22:24
Many of them rely over 60% other school districts on vendors.
2:22:31
And, we are fortunate to have a significant workforce of over 7,000 related service providers that are public school staff here.
2:22:39
In terms of mitigating, these national shortages that are really concerning across the board to all of us, we have partnered with our our colleagues in the division of human resources and have a number of innovative, incentive programs for eligible and licensed credential providers to come work for us from loan forgiveness in in high needs districts, to scholarship programs with local universities where their entire tuition is paid to come work here, as long as well as other incentives around tuition reimbursement and the ability to take courses.
2:23:15
We have often at every hiring hall, universities, pub, professional organization events to recruit and and seek to find folks to come and do this work.
2:23:27
In schools where we do not have a public school provider available, like Jessica mentioned, preschool services are largely, provided by vendors and non public school staff because the majority of those students are not in public school settings.
2:23:42
We have posted now a very an innovative related services RFP, that take feedback from our community members, including current providers and clinicians.
2:23:52
Chair, our current model of vendor services utilizes a fee for service model, and if the student doesn't come to school that day, the clinician does not get paid, and that's almost impossible for someone to sustain.
2:24:06
The new RFP has is increased rates, but also has an equivalent of a day rate, that we are gonna be able to utilize where it's necessary.
2:24:16
We that was the biggest point of feedback that we received over the years from constituents.
2:24:21
We are very optimistic that once that RFP is in place, which will be sometime next school year, that we will see an increase in service provision for students in those categories.
2:24:31
And we continue to work with our city partners around additional resources for, our much needed related service provider.
