About Me
Speech-Language Pathologist
I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri by two wonderful parents, Ben and Gail, with my sister, Jennifer.
I earned by B.S. in Communication Disorders from St. Louis University, where I also met my husband, Ryan. We moved back to his hometown, and I received my master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Cincinnati in 2001. I went on to begin my career shortly thereafter in pediatric private practice.
During my years there, I married Ryan, and we began our family. I am the very proud mother of two amazing young men, Aidan and Owen, who are now on their own paths to their futures as an entrepreneur and engineer, respectively.
Early in my career, I found my niche and dedicated myself to working with children with severe speech sound disorders. I have ceaselessly engaged in studies, continuing education, and training to make myself the best SLP I could for kids with the most profound speech disorders, specializing in Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Phonological Disorders, and Articulation Disorders as well as Early Intervention and Fluency Disorders. I have earned over 400 hours of education and training focused on speech-sound disorder remediation, particularly CAS. I am a Certified Recommended Provider through Apraxia Kids and am a PROMPT trained SLP.
I wanted to be able to focus on children with those needs and decided that having my own private practice was the best way to do that. I opened the doors of Foundation Communication in 2019, which has been extremely successful. I am proud of helping so many children in my own community, but I still felt like I could offer more to benefit even more kiddos outside of my area code. I have created and used many materials that year-after-year get put into a folder after I have completed a theme. I’ve been an SLP for a long time, and when I started, everything was hand-created, drawn, or colored. Recently, I have been working on recreating digital works of my materials. That’s where the idea of SpeakUpWithMissJill.com (& my Teachers Pay Teachers Store) was born.
I would love for you to walk with me on my journey! I hope that you will join my mailing list for tips, tricks, advice, and freebies and check out my blog as well as my store. Most importantly, I want you to just feel free to send me an email, no strings attached, to ask any questions you may have. My goal and purpose are to help speech pathologists help children build their Foundation of Communication!