Company offers online speech therapy to rural students

Rural schools often experience difficulty and inconsistency in accessing special services like speech therapy, said Diana Parafiniuk, chief operations officer of E-Therapy. 

Therapists are often brought into rural areas from the more urban areas, making for long commutes, she said. Those long commutes lead to other issues, including therapists not being able to spend extra time talking with parents and students, or car issues. 

E-Therapy seeks to eliminate some of those problems.

"I think we really bridged the gap for a lot of our rural schools that feel at the mercy of therapists who have to commute for two and a half hours," she said. 

With a contingent of more than 50 therapists, the company provides services to rural and urban schools across the country, including the Ajo Unified School District in Southern Arizona. 

Therapy sessions are conducted over an interactive web platform, which allows the therapist and the student to see each other in real-time. 

A typical session is about 30 minutes, during which therapists can monitor students' tongue movement or motor planning, Parafiniuk said. The platform also allows therapists upload activities and softwares. 

E-Therapy was started in 2009 by two friends who went to graduate school together at Northern Arizona University. Parafiniuk and her business parter, Birgit Suess, are both speech therapists.

"At that time, teletherapy was mostly done through video conferencing equipment," Parafiniuk said. "Internet was just kind of getting up to speed to be able to do it."

More web-based platforms catering to online therapy have emerged since then, allowing for companies like E-Therapy to infuse interactive games and screen-sharing into its program. 

The Ajo Unified School District is one of the Southern Arizona districts that use the Flagstaff-based E-Therapy. About 20 students benefit from this service, according to Robert Dooley, the district's superintendent. 

This is the first year Ajo has used E-therapy, he said. And so far, the experience has been positive.

"I believe we can have more flexibility in providing services to the children," he said.

In the past, the district has experienced issues with therapists having long commutes to Ajo from Phoenix or Tucson, he said. In one case, a therapist got her license suspended after getting a DUI conviction. 

Speech therapy is very expensive, he said. So it's important that the district gets the highest quality and most reliable therapists. That was the primary reason for trying online therapy, he added. 

"Any time a school does something different with parents' children, parents are going to be anxious about that and that's natural," he said. "They should be, because it's their child, but we equally want that child to be successful."