A Season of Advocacy and Thanks

Jeanette Benigas46min

Jeanette Benigas

00:00

Hey, fixers. I'm Dr Jeanette Benigas, the owner of fix SLP, a grassroots advocacy firm here to challenge the status quo in speech language pathology by driving real change from insurance regulations to removing barriers that prevent full autonomy like the CCC, this podcast is your space to learn, engage and take action in the field of speech language pathology. We don't wait for change. We make it so let's fix SLP.

Preston Lewis

00:46

Jeanette, it's another week in the fixerville. Here we are, and you hit the road this week. Oh my gosh. I drove 13 hours for a 45 minute meeting with no guarantee that that meeting would happen, because you got, like, an hour out the door and you say, what if they don't have a quorum? Yeah. Do you want to explain to people real quick what a quorum is? Yeah. So a quorum at a publicly held meeting, and some of you may know this, you have to have a for the bylaws, or perhaps with governance, you have to have a certain number of members of a board that are present in order to have a meeting. So if we'll say, for hypothetical sense, let's say you have eight members on a board. If you don't have at least probably five people there, then you can't have a meeting because it's not well represented. And in the case of the Delaware speech therapy licensing board, it has happened before. And no offense, this does happen where they have not had a significant number of the minimum quorum of members. They didn't have a meeting that month. And that does happen, they've had to shift meetings to a different month. So Jeanette gets in the car. She heads, what 12? It was a 12 hour round trip. I think at least maybe 13 it was, it was five hours and 58 minutes to get there. But when I left, I took rush hour in several states, it was a long drive home. So this is, you know, it was insanely far for me, but yeah, there's no guarantee. So I appeared via zoom. Jeanette was there on what about two hours of sleep? And it was a good meeting. Actually, the most impressive thing that was so heartwarming Jeanette was that we are now, and we went into the meeting with 35 Delaware SLPs signing our letter to the board, indicating the questions that we have concerning their licensure change. And we had, I think at least four SLPs show up at the meeting. We had an audiologist come out and speak for us. And so there was an excellent representation at the meeting of people that wanted to ask questions of this board. And we were glad to be there, and it was the board had very little to say, but wow, did our fixers really show up in a big way and ask the questions which were needed.

Jeanette Benigas

02:58

The exact words I said to you were, "Our fixer babies are all grown up." They did so well. I was a bit annoyed because, you know, they were following procedure. And we submitted that letter with our signatures, but also with the 35 other signatures, and the Board did not recognize the 35 people who signed that letter. They just said that you and I submitted the letter when clearly it was 20 pages long. We had lists of people who emailed us. We had physical signatures that were sent in, you know, it if they missed pages, you know, five through 18. So when it was time for the public comment, which was the purpose, part of the purpose of this meeting was public comment on their proposed changes, they gave me the floor first, which I was surprised, and I had to kind of go back and forth with the lawyer running that meeting. And I said, I don't want to go first. Basically, that's not how I said it. I was a little more professional, but what I said was, let's give the floor to your licensed SLPs in your state, it is most important to hear from them. I'm here as a representative of the firm, helping them to advocate, but they're the ones you need to hear from. They're the ones who have something to say. And she did not like that. I almost felt like she it almost felt like I was shut down, like I like I was get passing on being allowed to talk, and I made sure that didn't happen, but I felt like she just sort of dismissed me.

Preston Lewis

04:48

Well, it the whole the start of the meeting was clunky, because this lady that we're speaking of, it's a peculiar meeting. How they run them, because normally the board president is kind of the part. Person who directs the meeting, and they have one that she does do a lot of the talking. However, there's a lot of deferring to what is staff, if you will. And this particular person, I'll go ahead and just use our first name, Eileen. Eileen is the one of the assistant attorney generals for the state of Delaware, and she kind of takes the lead on a lot of the meeting as the stars, the flow and the procedure, which is a little skew, but, you know, that's how they do it. And she started off in the beginning, saying, I want to welcome and introduce. I'm very happy to introduce. And then her video froze,

Jeanette Benigas

05:34

which is amazing, perfect timing.

Preston Lewis

05:36

It was, it was kind of interesting. So she froze for, I'd say, a good solid 60 seconds, and then came back, and as happens on Zoom, she wasn't aware of what was heard and was wasn't heard. And the whole meeting, we had an ASHA eavesdropper, since they, I guess, weren't officially introduced. And Jeanette, I'll let you speak a little bit about that.

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