What’s behind a spike in childhood speech development delays across the U.S.

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• John Yang:

  Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there's been a dramatic increase in the number of young children who have been slow to develop language skills. Pediatric speech delays more than doubled for children aged 12 and younger. PBS Wisconsin reporter Zac Schultz spent time with students and teachers to find out what's behind this increase and whether schools have the resources to help children speak up.

• Zac Schultz:

  The children in this early headstart classroom are your typical two to three year olds. But they were born during the COVID-19 pandemic and some are at risk of developing a speech delay.

• Nichole Spooner, Director, Comprehensive Services, Next Door Foundation:

  I believe we are definitely in a dire state right now.

• Zac Schultz:

  Nichole Spooner is the director of comprehensive services at Next Door Foundation, a headstart program in Milwaukee. She says young children were severely impacted by the lockdown.

• Nichole Spooner:

  They were facing isolation, stress with their families, trauma, things of that nature. And so they're coming in now with really some challenging behaviors, speech delays, things of that nature. I think we're up about 10 percent right now and children who have speech delays diagnosed.

• Zac Schultz:

  Across the state, it's the same story.

• Megan Bohlken, Speech Language Pathologist:

  There's just too many kids for me to fit in.

• Zac Schultz:

  Megan Bohlken is one of four full time speech language pathologists at Platteville School District in southern Wisconsin. Each of their case loads is maxed out. And once a student is diagnosed with a speech delay, federal and state law mandates the district provide the services, whether they have the funding or not.

• Megan Bohlken:

  Are definitely kids who will just hand you stuff and expect that you know what they want to do with it and not say anything to you.

  Rebecca Alper, University of Wisconsin at Madison: Early language skills are one of the best predictors of academic social vocational outcomes.

• Zac Schultz:

  Rebecca Alper is an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison studying early The Language and Literacy Intervention.

• REBECCA ALPER:

  We're really just kind of trying to get a sense for where the child's language levels are.

• Zac Schultz:

  She says the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a lot of existing health disparities along the lines of race, income, or even where someone lives and young children were no different.

• Rebecca Alper:

  It's very hard to focus on early language intervention when you're experiencing housing insecurity, food insecurity, all of those sorts of things.

• Zac Schultz:

  Alper's team is studying how best to support caregivers of young children since language development starts at birth.

• Rebecca Alper:

  What would be the most supportive long term is to really help support early identification and early intervention? Because the earlier we can intervene, the better the long term prognosis are.

• Woman:

  I have one for everybody. Peyton, would you like to put this on?

• Zac Schultz:

  Back at Next Door in Milwaukee, they use a system called LENA to help identify kids with possible speech delay.

• Shakeda Caldwell, Teacher:

  These events are going to record the amount of interactions that we're having with each other, it's going to tell us how often we talk to each other because talking is very important.

• Woman:

  It's like a superhero this time.

• Zac Schultz:

  Shakeda Caldwell is the lead teacher in this classroom, and convinces the kids to wear vests that contain a small device that monitors and counts interactions between kids and teachers.

• Shakeda Caldwell:

  Well guess what is going to do, it's going to help you this talk more, and it's going to help your teachers talk to you more. And we're going to build lots of vocabulary together.

  Tonya Hameister, Director of Education Services, Next Door: They are actually recording the frequency of the interactions between the teachers and the children.

• Zac Schultz:

  Tonya Hameister is the Director of Education Services at Next Door. She says from the LENA device, they download the data, which creates a chart to show the number of times a student and teacher talk to each other, that lets the teachers know which students need more attention.

• Shakeda Caldwell:

  So if I have that child who scored lower who wasn't having many interactions, then I will plan to, okay, I'm going to have a one on one with this child. Maybe I'm going to read more books with him. I want him to name I'm going to ask him what does he see in the book so I can get those words out of hand.

• Zac Schultz:

  Hameister says LENA started as a research program. But now next door has adopted it for all early headstart classrooms.

• Tonya Hameister:

  We saw an increase, especially in the children that were not as verbal that is expressive. We saw a pretty significant increase in the amount of interactions. So the teachers were doing very targeted interactions with children and trying to increase that opportunity for them to be expressive.

• Zac Schultz:

  Hameister says Next Door is fortunate enough to have a lot of community support. But she worries about schools that are dealing with a budget crunch and a surge in speech referrals.

  In the last state budget, Governor Tony Evers proposed using the budget surplus to put an extra billion dollars into special education funding, Republicans in the legislature only allotted an extra 107 million statewide over the next two years, just a 2 percent increase.

• Tonya Hameister:

  It's a challenge. It is a huge challenge. We know a lot of our systems are resource depleted, and they're tired.

• Zac Schultz:

  Megan Bohlken says burnout in her industry is a real concern. And while they're doing okay right now, next February, they start screenings for the 4k students. The next wave of speech delays is waiting to be identified.

• Megan Bohlken:

  Those referrals keep coming as those kids are evaluated. And if they qualify, getting them added onto my schedule, that's when it's going to start to be okay, now I feel like I'm drowning. Now, what are we going to do.

• Zac Schultz:

  For PBS News Weekend, I'm Zac Schultz in Platteville, Wisconsin.