Meet the Speech Pathologist staff at Little Lukes Preschool & Childcare Center in Fulton

Brittany’s Speech Pathology Background

Brittany Jarrard has been a Speech Pathologist at Little Lukes Preschool & Childcare Center in Fulton since August 2015. Jarrard says that although working with children is challenging, it is even more rewarding. “They may be unpredictable and surprise you with the skills that they have. Working with children provides area for growth when skills were not initially present. It gives you the feeling of success when a child finally meets his/her goal or achieves a skill he/she has been working on,” said Jarrard. 

A Speech Language Pathologist is a professional who works in the field of Speech-Language Pathology or Speech Pathologist. They target the areas of voice disorder, speech sound disorders, language disorders, cognitive therapy, fluency or stuttering disorders among other areas. They can work with children through adults, targeting many different areas to increase functionality of the individuals.

 

“I knew I wanted a career where I would be helping people and all of my friends were going into education. I didn’t want to follow the crowd and started researching other career opportunities that had a good job market that sounded like it might work for me,” said Jarrard, “I was between physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech pathology. I ended up choosing speech because it was offered at the college I wanted to attend.”

 

Part of Jarrard’s job at Little Lukes Preschool & Childcare Center is to help prepare children for Kindergarten. “I work on age-appropriate skills for the kiddos who are higher functioning that are able to target those skills (e.g. pronouns, speech intelligibility, following directions, same/different, etc.),” said Jarrard, “I work on overall communication skills to increase their functionality expressing their needs and wants to peers and adults in classroom and therapy settings.”

 

 

The Little Lukes Atmosphere

“The atmosphere at the Fulton Little Lukes is positive. Little Lukes allows you to work with a variety of amazing, talented people who come from different areas and are different ages,” said Jarrard, “we have an amazing therapy team with physical therapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy, as well as amazing special education teachers. All of the classroom teachers, TAs and subs are helpful, knowledgeable and friendly. Our director, Teresa, goes above and beyond to show her appreciation for her staff.”

 

“The best part about working in a preschool center-based setting is you follow the school calendar, which provides more time off in the summer and for snow days,” said Jarrard, “it is also nice that children cycle through and stay about 2-3 years depending on their incoming age, which allows you to see many new children over the years while still working with only the preschool age group. The work hours (7:30-3:30) allows for additional work after hours picking up additional CPSE kiddos, EI kiddos, and doing evaluations.”

 

 

If you are interested in a Speech Pathology job at Little Lukes in the Syracuse, Oswego, or Watertown areas email apply @littlelukes.com