The Hours That Never Made the Schedule

A preschool SLP came to see me in March one year, and she started the conversation by apologizing.

She'd built her caseload in September and it had been fine. Full, but the kind of full you can work with. Then the three-year-olds started arriving. They come in all year, a few at a time, as each one ages out of Early Intervention and into the district, and by March she'd taken on enough of them that the year she'd planned in September no longer existed. She wasn't behind on anything. She was just underwater, and she'd come in to tell me so, and she opened by saying sorry.

I believed her. I'd watched her work. But I also had to carry her case to a business office, so I asked whether she could put together something I could bring with me, and that's about where it went quiet. She said she'd try. I don't think either of us understood why that was such a hard thing to ask for.

Her schedule showed direct service. Thirty-minute blocks, a few groups, laid out across five days.

I opened it and saw it packed, and I did what anybody does with a full calendar. Figured she was maxed out. Booked solid, nothing left to give.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that a week filled edge to edge with direct service isn't a full workload at all. It's a workload with the air squeezed out of it, and the air is where the rest of the job lives.

Rebecca writes about this in her guidebook and calls it the invisible cause of burnout. She's coming at it as the clinician. I'm the guy who used to be sitting on the other side of the desk, holding the schedule, asking the wrong question.

Think about what every one of those new three-year-olds actually brought with them.

A transition meeting, with prep before and follow-up after. An eligibility determination. A new IEP to write. Progress notes once she started writing them. Materials built for one specific kid who nobody in the building had ever met. A conversation with the PreK teacher about what this child needs and how to set the room up for them. Sometimes a device to program, which is not a five-minute job. A family still grieving the end of a home-visit model, who needed twenty minutes she didn't have.

And then, every so often, walking down to the classroom to see whether any of it was showing up anywhere outside her room.

All of that is student work. A lot of it is what decides whether the direct service transfers at all.

None of it was anywhere on the schedule I was holding.

Which means it was happening somewhere. It was happening at lunch, and during the prep period that was supposed to be for prep, and at her kitchen table after her own kids went to bed. The work was getting done the whole time. We just had no record that it existed.

Say a caseload of 45, and say your district sets a floor of 30 minutes of indirect time per student per year. That's about as modest as a floor gets.

You're already at 22.5 hours. Half a work week, spoken for, before you've accounted for anything out of the ordinary.

And that's the floor applied as though every student on the list were the easiest one. It doesn't cover the kid who just got a device, or the team that needs a protocol built from nothing, or the child who arrived in February with a folder from Early Intervention and a family who needs to hear from you every week until they trust the new place.

Fill the schedule to 100 percent and those hours don't go away, they just move somewhere nobody can see them.

Here's the loop, and I was part of it for a decade.

A provider can't document work there's no field for. An administrator can't fund work that isn't documented. So the provider absorbs it quietly, because the kid still needs it done, and the fact that she absorbed it is exactly what makes next spring's request look as thin as this spring's did.

Nobody in that loop is behaving badly. I wasn't wrong to ask for data. I was asking for something the system had never been built to produce, and I had no idea.

What I'd give to go back to that March meeting and know that.

Pull up one provider's schedule this week and ask them what they did last Tuesday that isn't on it.

It helps to say out loud that it isn't an audit, because people brace. Then just listen.

You'll hear about a device reprogrammed over lunch, a teacher coached in a doorway, a protocol written after dinner. None of it is on the page in your hand, and most of it is why the student is moving.

Then when you build next year's schedules, try 85 percent instead of 100 and watch where the other 15 goes. My guess is it goes to work that was already happening, and the person doing it stops paying for it with her own evenings.

And if you run a preschool program, look at your own turning-three pattern before September instead of after March. The children arriving in February are already born. That part, at least, you can see coming.

If you've read a schedule this way, or had yours read this way, hit reply and tell me about it. One line is plenty, and I do read all of them.

-Eric