Where Are They Now: Kelley Morris, MS, CCC-SLP ‘17

Although her mother is a speech-language pathologist, Kelley Morris, MS ‘17, spent much of her youth telling herself she wasn’t going to follow in her mother’s professional footsteps.

Until she did.

“My whole life I said I was not going to become an SLP. I was going to do physical therapy but everything started falling into place,” said Morris, of Levittown, Pennsylvania, who received her degree in a self-designed SLP undergraduate program at The College of New Jersey. “My mom knew. I would be sitting with her and asking questions about her clients and I was diagnosing people from a young age. She knew I had the skills.”

Before continuing her graduate studies in speech-language pathology, Morris took a gap year after undergrad to wait for the launch of the new SLP program at Salus University (now Drexel University, Elkins Park Campus) in 2015.

“I was excited because there was so much unknown and because it felt like Salus was trying to breathe some fresh air into the whole SLP system,” said Morris, who was in the program’s inaugural graduating Class of 2017. “I knew that it would have to be state-of-the-art because all eyes were on the program. They were being watched, so there was no way the new program was going to cut any corners.”

She said her experience at Salus gave her and the other students a sense of building the program together with the faculty. Morris added that when she completed the program and earned her graduate degree, she was well-prepared to enter the professional world.

“I came out perfectly confident that I had what I needed. Certainly, there are things you just can’t learn in the school setting that you have to learn once you’re on the ground, trial by fire once you’re in the field, but everything you can learn in grad school, I felt like I had learned,” she said.

Since graduation, that professional learning has continued. Her first job was working at an outpatient facility in pediatrics for a couple of years. She followed that experience in a position working with adults with autism. And, then she went to a private school working with children with special needs ages three to 21.

For the past couple of years, Morris has worked at the Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Intermediate Unit in the preschool early intervention program handling itinerant services in homes and preschools around the county. 

“It’s nice to get kids when they are starting. They’re excited to come to speech, it’s not a chore for them yet,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to make a good first impression with speech for them. It shows them that speech is fun, it’s something that is enjoyable and you should be excited to come.”

Although her mom is now retired, she didn’t leave the SLP world completely. She took a post-retirement position that required learning new skills, which put mother and daughter in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) trenches together. “We were working through some ‘firsts’ together and trying to figure it (the IEP creation process) out,” said Morris. “And, we did end up working in the same school for three years.”

Looking down the road, Morris enjoys working with Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and could see herself in a role in that world. “But the autism community has my heart. I will always be involved with kids and adults with autism,” she said.