Burdens and Blessings of Feeding Tubes | Claire Reilly

[laughs] But, um, in all seriousness, um, big things are happening in the world, and we still need you to continue advocating.

So earlier this year here in the States, the Department of Education declared speech pathology a non-professional degree-seeking status.

That basically meant int- that graduate students, um, would have a cap placed on their ability to take out student loans, which derailed countless students' opportunities to pursue this profession, um, across the country.

Well, this week a judge put a kibosh in that.

Um, it's already being appealed and whatnot, but it means that there is hope that this will not come to fruition, that speech pathology will continue to be a professional degree, and that the cap on student loans will be, um, done away with.

But we're not out of the woods.

So this is me imploring you to fight for our profession.

So if you get on the ASHA PAC website, um, and you can go down to, like, the ad- ASHA advocacy page, um, there's a ton of different items and actions that you can take a stance on.

It takes literally, like, 30 seconds, a minute tops.

All you have to do is pick the one you wanna advocate for, the initiative, the, um, policy change you want undone, for lack of a better phrase.

Put your address in, put your ASHA number, and it will pre-populate the letter directly to your representatives and senators so they can continue to advocate for us, and that's huge.

Huge, huge.

So please continue fighting.

Um, all right.

So on with, um, some other fantastic updates.