Black Leaders Awareness Day

Written By Jessica Pardos

Did you know July 18th is Black Leaders Awareness Day? It is a day to celebrate and acknowledge the work and experience of black leaders in our community.

Today, I want to celebrate three change-makers in the field of speech-language pathology: Dr. Walton, Dr. Chaney, and Dr. Jones. I was honored to be classmates with these leaders in our doctoral program, during which we completed culminating projects to ignite change in the field.

Learn more about what these amazing women do as leaders in the field of speech pathology!

Dr. Ebony Walton CCC-SLP

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Ebony has served the birth through adult population in Atlanta, GA, for almost 19 years. She currently works full-time as a diagnostician in a local school system but also enjoys working PRN in the NICU, LTACH, and adult acute care settings, where she advocates for every patient.

Ebony's passion for advocacy has led her to address the disparity between white children and black children who receive early intervention services. The title of her culminating project is "Exploring FACES: A Randomized Waitlist Control Group Study of a Psycho-Educational Intervention for Minority Families of Children with Autism." She describes this work, “By implementing FACES, a parent training program designed to combat the disparities in early intervention receipt, I will assess the effectiveness of the program to increase caregiver knowledge about autism, increase their knowledge of special education law and increase their perception of themselves as advocates in the medical and educational settings."

Cred: https://www.instagram.com/nu_audslp/

Dr. Jakaycee Chaney-Butler CCC-SLP

A Houston, TX-based pediatric #speechlanguagepathologist with 3 years of experience primarily serving with those she affectionately refers to as her “tiny humans” 💜 and their families.

The title of her culminating project (CP) is "Investigating Provider Bias Through Demonstration of Non-Verbal Behaviors with Black Families with Autism Concern.” She outlined her CP as a mixed-methods study that explores how a provider's non-verbal behaviors, influenced by implicit biases, can affect the provider-caregiver relationship—specifically, the relationship between providers and black families with autism concerns.

Cred: https://www.instagram.com/nu_audslp/

Dr. Alexandria Jones CCC-SLP

Dr. Jones is a school-based speech-language pathologist for Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, KY. She has 8 years of experience serving children from Pre-K to grade 5.

Alexandria’s research interests include multicultural issues related to the assessment and treatment of culturally and linguistically diverse populations and the recruitment and retention of racial/ethnic minority SLPs.

Her culminating project is titled “An Investigation into the Psychometric Properties of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Norm Referenced, on School-age Children, from Urban Communities.” She expounded, “the most commonly used comprehensive language assessments increase the chance of over-diagnosis of language disorders in children who speak African-American English (AAE). Answers on these assessments are often only correct if the child responds using linguistic features that are characteristic of Mainstream American English (MAE). The normative samples that were used to develop these assessments include only a small percentage of culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Use of these assessments make it difficult to determine the distinctions between a language difference vs. a language disorder. The DELV-NR is a norm-referenced assessment that was developed to limit assessment bias for children who speak non-mainstream dialects of English. My project examines the validity and reliability of the DELV-NR in children who speak AAE.”

Cred: https://www.instagram.com/nu_audslp/

Jessica Pardos
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