In One of Utah’s Largest School Districts, a Cutting-Edge Partnership with the COH is Improving Early Language Learning
By Sarah Shebek
COVID and virtual learning made it tough for young students to stay up to speed—a study this year showed that fourth graders across the nation had fallen behind in reading and math.
Elementary students in Utah face the same challenges. But one local school district decided to team up with the College of Health to proactively identify students who needed extra help.
Tyler Christopulos, PhD, CCC-SLP, an assistant professor with the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, already worked with the Davis School District to explore more effective ways of identifying school-age children with language learning challenges. Thanks to his connections, he was able to partner with Taya Johnson, the district’s director of related services, to implement district-wide language screenings for all first-grade classrooms.
“Language difficulty in the early elementary school years is an increasingly critical issue because it is strongly connected to reading skills,” Christopulos said. “The Davis School District is taking a proactive approach by screening for language challenges early, rather than relying on the traditional referral-based system, which often misses children with language difficulties. This sets them apart from other districts.”
It wasn’t an easy task. The district is one of Utah’s largest school districts with more than 60 elementary schools and not enough speech language pathologists to take on new duties. But Johnson had received enough calls from concerned parents and teachers to try something new.
“I had people asking me if we could do universal screenings, but we figured it was never going to happen in a district of our size,” she said. “Tyler came in and mentioned the language screener we could use, and we thought it would be a great solution for identifying which students needed interventions.”
From these discussions, the district and Christopulos established a research practice partnership built on a foundation of collaborative, long-term relationships. It allows them to co-develop, implement and evaluate research initiatives that address the practical and unique educational needs of the district.
As part of this partnership, Christopulos suggested using CSD graduate students, who could sign up on a volunteer basis, to solve the staffing problem. He focused on first-semester students who needed clinical hours but were relatively inexperienced.
“What’s really cool about this is that these students are classroom heavy during that first semester,” he said. “Most of them haven’t had any clinical experiences, so this gives them real life practice with school sites, screening measures, and assessment data. Then when they enter their full clinical work their second semester, it gives them a really strong foundation of confidence.”
Veronica Zayas-Velez is one of those students. She noted that CSD students need 375 clinical hours to graduate, and the screenings make it convenient to jump start those numbers.
“It helped me with diagnostics especially and gave me experience with baseline data,” she said. “I’m also enjoying working with kids who are learning English—one of the kids I worked with spoke Chinese. It’s been a fun experience.”
Since the research practice partnership started two years ago, more than 65 graduate and speech-language pathology assistant students have participated in the screenings. They’ve successfully screened more than 8,000 first grade students.
Screening teams start at the beginning of the school year and complete all first-grade classrooms by the end of October. Each individual screening takes approximately five to seven minutes.
Once the CSD students complete screenings at a specific school, Christopulos collects the data and analyzes the results to ensure students in need are receiving the appropriate interventions. He collaborates closely with the school site speech-language-pathologists to review the screening results and determine the most effective strategies for supporting identified students.
“We’re already learning and made some improvements this year,” he said. “The first year we didn’t do a very good job of capturing the English Language Learning student population, so we’ve added a secondary screening measure that is better suited for that population.”
Andrah Lake Hansen, another student who participated in the screenings, helped Christopulos survey the district’s speech-language pathologists after the first year of the program for input. She found that 87% supported the yearly language screenings, an impressive number for a new initiative. Additionally, results showed that 93% of district speech-language pathologists enthusiastically supported the collaborative partnership with the University of Utah.
This partnership has been incredibly rewarding," she said. "Not only does it benefit the students and the district, but it also gives us graduate students invaluable hands-on experience that directly prepares us for our future careers. I'm grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this project and for the learning experience it has provided.”
As for Taya Johnson, she couldn’t be more pleased.
“Tyler has been phenomenal, so supportive and helpful,” she said. “The grad students have also been awesome, and we couldn’t do it without them. The amount of information we get from working one-on-one with these students is essential.”
Moving forward, Johnson hopes that the screenings will be a permanent part of the district’s assessments. The data is valuable, and teachers can use it to provide early interventions to students who need it most.
“Early language learning is so important,” she said. “It’s a vital piece of education, and I hope it’s something everyone knows that we’ll do.”
Today the Davis School District is one of only a few districts in the country who use active-find universal screenings for language difficulties in early elementary children.
“This partnership is very positive,” Christopulos said. “These research practice partnerships live and die on the individual level, and this one wouldn’t exist without my partners, especially Taya Johnson. It’s really her forward thinking that’s making this happen.”