East HartfordPublic Schools

Alexis St. Croix is the Speech & Language Pathologist at Pitkin Elementary School and an assistive technology specialist in the school district. She uses a wide variety of tools, strategies and supports to help students with differing needs gain independence and confidence through communication.

“The impact she has on our students and our staff every day is incredible,” said Pitkin Principal Bea Corrado. “When you're around her, you're going to see just an incredibly enriched, positive learning environment where she is meeting the needs of all of the kids in the diverse group of kids that she's working with. For some kids, she may be helping support them with assistive technology. Other kids, she might be utilizing sign language within that same small group. Everything is always differentiated based on their IEP goals and based on where their needs are.”

As an expert in assistive technology, St. Croix also works outside of Pitkin to support the school district and its students. Corrado said she goes “above and beyond.”

“She will collaborate with universities to help create different assistive technology tools for students. Last year, she had, for one of our kids, created a tool where he could throw a football at recess and actually play with kids,” explained Corrado. “She goes to the middle school to continue to support students that have transitioned from Pitkin School to the middle school, helping train staff, helping work with staff to support these kids. Once they're a part of her team, she continues to support them throughout their educational journey, which is remarkable.”

Learn more about Alexis St. Croix in the Q&A below.

What does your job as a speech & language pathologist entail?

St. Croix: A little bit of everything. We're working with communication disorders and needs across the entire school K-5 and then in specialized classrooms, self-contained classrooms, medically fragile classrooms, and just working on communication supports across the board.

A lot of times people think about a speech therapist as just doing articulation on the speech sounds, but really everything is communication. Everything is language-based, and any activity can be language-based. So it's really nice to be able to work across all of the different contexts in classrooms, to be able to integrate communication supports into classrooms with students with significant needs, but also classrooms where students are not having such significant needs that they don't need to be pulled out so often.

What are some of the supports, tools and practices you’ll work on with your students?

St. Croix: So many things and that's what keeps the job so fun. You’ll never have a dull moment, and there's never a boring day because you literally are working with so many different students and doing so many different things.

So you might do language based supports, building vocabulary, building sentence structure skills, building comprehension skills when students are reading or listening to verbal language. Typically some of the higher grade students are working on things like that. And then, we do some AI speech articulation, remediate some speech sound errors. Also working on integrating literacy with that, so students are learning about the sound awareness of how that sound works when they're reading as well as in their speaking, because it all kind of blends together, of course.

And then in some of the more complex communication kind of needs, we're working with a lot of assistive technology, either iPads or things like that, or even low tech, just using sign language, using visual supports, using whatever. You know, we think of it as a total communication approach where you can just use any mode of communication to get students to be able to express themselves a little bit better.

What was your professional background that led you to your role at Pitkin?

St. Croix: This will be my fourth year here at Pitkin. Before this, I did early intervention. I came from a different state. I came from Vermont, actually. So I was going into homes, working with birth to three, and then also students with more significant needs up to age 22. That really put my mindset into connecting with the family and the team and working with a group of providers rather than just working individually with a student. So I really come at it from that perspective.

Pitkin is my first school experience and it’s just a really warm environment. All of the staff, they work really well together. Everybody is really just focused on what is best for the children.

What are your goals for your students?

St. Croix: The goal is just to really build their independence at any level. It's just to build their independence and their confidence and their ability to really recognize their own strengths and their needs and be able to work toward that.

What is it like for you to see students make progress who previously were struggling to communicate?

St. Croix: It’s such a celebration because it's no one person that really led to that. But it's that team of the teachers, the family, everybody who had to put in those supports, and to see students gain that independence and that confidence when they gained those skills that they know that they've been working on, is really just such a celebration for everybody.