Ms. Cruz officially began her first year teaching at WHS on September 5th, 2018. She works as a speech language pathologist and assists students with any difficulties they might have with their verbal expression. Ms. Cruz put many years towards her own education to become certified in this subject. She completed undergraduate school at Howard University in Washington D.C and finished off with graduate school at Columbia University in New York. From there on, she taught for twelve years before joining the staff at WHS. Throughout her lengthy education and career, she has been met with many who do not understand the depth of her specialty.

Barron Perspective: What is speech language pathology?
Ms. Cruz: I work with students in a variety of different areas. Under the speech umbrella, that could be a student who stutters or who has difficulty pronouncing certain sounds like maybe the S, L, or R sound. I can also work with students who have voice issues, for example their voice could be hoarse. Overall, speech deals with voice, fluency (stuttering), and articulation. As for language, that would be for students who have difficulty with comprehension. I’ll also work a lot with vocabulary or grammar, a lot of grammatical language based issues.

BP: Where did you work prior to teaching at Woodbridge?
MC: I’ve always worked in education, but I was a speech therapist in New York before I came here.

BP: What made you want to be involved in education?
MC: My mother was a speech therapist.

BP: How do you like Woodbridge so far?
MC: I like it! I mean I’m definitely busy, I have a pretty big caseload. It’s also really diverse, I like it because I can the testing side and the therapy side. Whether a student is referred to me and I test them to see if they still qualify or kids who have already been identified and I give them services based on the recommendations from their test.

BP: How many students would you say you work with?
MC: I’d say a bit over sixty.

BP: Is there anything that you look forward to this school year?
MC: What I look forward to most would be getting to that area where I’m making steady progress with my students so that not only they can see their success, but I can see their success. I want us both to feel successful about the work they are doing.

BP: Is there anything else you would like to add?
MC: If people know about speech therapy they mostly think that it’s really just to fix R’s or S’s or help people say words, but really that is the minority. Even most adults, not just students, think this. Really, that is the smallest percentage of speech therapy, it’s really mostly language based. In my whole career I’ve had more kids who had language based concerns rather than pronunciation concerns.