@ninja wife, I hope that you get the job and that you will keep us posted. From the amount of hearts that you have received, I think that your issue is probably an all too frequent one that crosses disciplines. I am also an SLP (with "C's" -- Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) and have always thought that most of the companies who contracted for allied health professionals were akin to professional bandits and, if at all possible, should be avoided when seeking employment. I could tell you many stories, but I will only relate one small personal one. While I was employed full-time as an SLP in a hospital, I moonlighted doing some Home Health Care as a contractor. It took me some time to learn that I was being paid (per session) less than half of what the agency received from Medicare -- despite the fact that I paid ALL of my professional expenses including costs for my license, ASHA dues, CEUs, malpractice insurance, therapy materials, office supplies, transportation to homes, etc. All that the agency did was to provide referrals and stage staff meetings. They did review my progress notes but held no responsibility if they did not meet the federal standards for payment, I just would not get paid if they did not meet standards, which actually never happened. Although my agency was ethical, the room for abuse and excess profit for the owner of the company was enormous. It was the excess profit part that got to me. I was doing "the heavy lifting," or actual clinical work, and they were getting most of the money. It also became apparent that changes in the laws seledom really benefited the patients. Once I got the big picture, I bailed -- on principle -- and eventually started a small private practice on the side with school-aged children. I charged a relatively modest fee and refused to deal with insurance. The parents were happy and so was I since I did not have to put in the time to labor over insurance claims and demands that were not always reasonable or in the client's best interest. Small advertisements in a parent magazine got me started and, from there, I got referrals by word of mouth. But .... to get back to your current situation: I do not think that the school system would financially benefit from hiring a CFY (Clinical Fellowship Year) person as they require supervision -- requiring them to pay the supervisor, I know that there are ways to decrease these costs but they are not always in the interest of good clinical practice. I am heartened by the President's recent proposal for increased federal spending for education and rehabiitation and hope that this helps your situation. I also wonder if ASHA might have any advice for you or if you would be wiling to contact them and add your voice to this growing issue. This has been a long response and I did not even begin to go into the details of the problem or mention dollar driven examples such as refusal to reimburse for group therapy in SNF's at one time, only to strongly encourage it as a cost-effective measure later. All of this is only one off-shoot of the egregious big business control of health care that exists in our country today. And, above all, care for our children needs to be determined by the expertise of the professionals providing the care, not the bottom line.
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