MONTREAL -- One group of students, and teachers, has an especially tough balance to strike this September over how close they can get to each other -- and how well they can learn without that closeness.
Speech pathologists and audiologists help kids who have lisps, speech delays, or other problems communicating for all sorts of reasons. They sometimes help kids with autism and other social delays, for example, learn how to read facial expressions and emotions.
“It's necessary for them to see our mouths in order to copy or imitate our movements,” said Tamara Paull told CTV, the founder and clinical director of SpeakAble Speech and Language Services.
She says she needs to see her students’ mouths, and the students need to see hers.
“We work with kids with lisps and other articulation delays and being able to see their faces (particularly lips, tongue and jaw positioning) is necessary in order to provide feedback and instruction,” she said.
"They really do need to look at the clinicians' mouths, too.”
Teachers like Paull have needed to sort through two questions: whether and when to do in-person sessions, and how to get ahold of transparent masks, which she says are hard to come by.
The good thing is that virtual learning is long established among many speech pathologists, and it works well. Paull says it's a great option for most -- 80 per cent, she says -- of her students.
This endorsement is backed up by speech-language pathologists across Canada and the U.S. They have been using tele-practice (phone or video learning) since the 1970s as a tool to reach remote clients.
Regulatory bodies, including Quebec’s order of speech language pathologists and audiologists, say tele-practice is just as effective as in-person learning and have endorse its use in the pandemic.
But there are still some, Paull says, who can't learn online.
“A lot of the students we work with have attention difficulties like ADHD, or are too young to sit in front of a screen.”
Which is why Paull is going back to in-person classes in September. She's planning on face-to-face sessions once a week for those who need more complex evaluations, oral motor functioning assessments, or who can’t learn online.
And that brings up the issue of masks, a much tougher problem to solve.
In Quebec, children under 12 are not required to wear a mask in public. But for the adults, respecting mask-wearing is necessary -- it's just that in this case, the masks must be clear.
"Transparent masks are an absolute must for me and my team,” says Paull.
She says her and her colleagues have had difficulty acquiring FDA-approved transparent masks in Canada, leaving them to buy poorly constructed handmade ones online.
“I bought my clear mask on Etsy," she said. "It isn’t snug to my face. It fogs up so I have to put dry dish soap on the inside to prevent it from fogging up. It’s gross.”
JoAnne Wilding is a speech-language pathologist in Outremont. She says her team searched the Canadian and American markets for clear masks, to no avail.
They have now sourced the masks they need from Germany for a cost of 50 Euros ($77 CAD) per mask.
