Providence is NOT enforcing CA’s statewide mandatory mask rules. They say that those kids are under 2 or have disabilities, but I’ve seen older kids (clearly over 5) without masks. My kid has a disability too, as most of our kids at private speech therapy do. My kid hates masks too, but we wear one because it’s the governor’s order and for public safety precautions. When I said something about it, they told me that they refused to enforce the governor’s order and that we could wait outside if we didn’t like it, instead of telling the others to follow the rules and wear their masks. I have this in writing from their director. And this is at a medical service provider’s office, where safety and adherence should be an example to others, not a rebellious outlier.
Another thing is that one of the therapists (the lead) tried to grab my child and force him to sit. He’s autistic, and very sensitive to touch, so he lashed out (yelled and hit her arm to get it away from him) at her when she put her hands on him. Then she claimed that HE attacked her, but she’s the one out of her chair, grabbing at him first, which provoked him when she could’ve offered a reward system, like most practitioners do, to encourage compliance. She talked to me like a child and gave me, not my child, homework. Egregiously, she tried to instruct me to carry out her tasks during session, which no provider has ever asked me to do. I asked what she was going to do if I conducted the therapy. She said she was going to “observe” me. I refused and told her we didn’t need her to be paid to “observe” for 30 minutes. It’s my role to observe, not hers. She made my child hate going to speech. We switched from her incompetent “care” immediately after the grabbing incident. She should know better than to put her hands on a child, which is unprofessional. She keeps a big frame with her CSUN degrees on the wall, which is a testament to her mediocrity and ethnic privilege. As a double USC alum, undergrad and grad, I have worked in higher education and never put my degrees on the wall at work, and I’ll be darned if I’ll be talked down to by a CSUN grad.
The only reason I chose this place is that licensed SLP’s work with the kids instead of a bunch of students and interns, like at most speech providers. I’m okay with the alternate provider we now have, even though my child still hates coming to Providence.
