The first two weeks of a school year determine most of what the next nine months feel like. Not because of anything clinical — because of scheduling, compliance deadlines, and relationships that are cheap to build in August and expensive to build in November.
This is a working checklist for a school SLP's start of year, organized by when each item needs to happen. It assumes you are walking into an existing caseload, which is the usual case.
Before Students Arrive
1. Build the Caseload Master View
One list, one place, with every student: name, grade, teacher, service minutes, individual or group, goal areas, annual review date, reevaluation due date, and Medicaid eligibility if your district bills. Whether that lives in your caseload system or a spreadsheet matters less than it existing before day one.
Then sort it three ways and look at each: by annual review date (what is due in the next 60 days), by reevaluation date (what testing is coming this year), and by service minutes (what your total obligation actually is). Most start-of-year problems are visible in one of those three sorts.
2. Flag Compliance Risks Immediately
Look specifically for IEPs that expired over the summer, reevaluations past due, students who moved in with out-of-district IEPs that have not been adopted, and any student whose service minutes you cannot physically schedule. Email your special education coordinator about every one of these in your first week, in writing, with a proposed resolution date.
Do this even if — especially if — you inherited the problem. A documented inherited problem is a district issue. The same problem raised in December is yours.
3. Calculate Your Real Capacity
Total contracted minutes, minus meetings, minus evaluation time, minus travel between buildings, minus documentation time, equals available service minutes. Compare that to the sum of IEP service minutes on your caseload.
If the second number exceeds the first, you have a staffing conversation to have now, in August, with numbers — not a crisis to have in January. ASHA's 2024 Schools Survey found a median caseload of 50 against a median manageable caseload of 40, so a gap here is common rather than a sign you have miscounted. It still needs to be surfaced.
4. Confirm Space, Access, and Logistics
- Where you will see students, whether it is shared, and who else has a claim on it
- Building access, keys, and badge for every building on your assignment
- Login credentials for the IEP system, the SIS, and your documentation platform — test them before day one, not during your first session
- Whether you are on the master schedule for anything you did not agree to (lunch duty, bus duty, coverage)
- Copier access, supply budget, and how to request materials
5. Set Up Your Documentation System Before You Need It
Note templates, data collection sheets or screens, and progress reporting periods should be configured before the first session, not built reactively in week three. ASHA's 2024 Schools Survey found "large amount of paperwork" was the number one ranked challenge in every facility type at 76%, with weekly documentation averaging roughly 6.0 hours. That load is predictable — the difference between clinicians who manage it and those who drown in it is almost entirely whether the system was set up in advance.
Concretely: one note format used across the whole caseload, data collection that happens in the same place as the note, and progress report deadlines already on your calendar with a preparation block scheduled a week before each one.
Week One With Students
6. Send the Teacher Introduction
A short email to every teacher with a student on your caseload: who you are, which of their students you serve, roughly when you will be pulling or pushing in, how you prefer to be contacted, and an explicit invitation to tell you what they are seeing. Include a one-line note that the schedule is not final yet and you will be asking for their input — teachers respond very differently to being consulted than to being informed.
7. Send the Parent Introduction
A brief letter or email to every family: who you are, what their child works on, when services start, how to reach you, and what you would like to know from them. Families whose only contact with the SLP is the annual review meeting are much harder to work with in April than families who heard from you in September.
8. Do a Baseline Check on Every Student
Summer regression is real and inherited goal data is often stale. A brief probe on each current goal in the first two weeks gives you a defensible starting point for the year's progress reporting, tells you which goals are already mastered, and identifies students whose IEP needs an amendment rather than nine months of therapy on the wrong target.
This does not need to be elaborate — 10 trials on the primary goal is enough to know whether the goal is still the right one.
9. Establish Group Routines Deliberately
Spend part of the first sessions teaching how your room works: how students get to you, what happens when they arrive, the turn-taking structure, the data sheet or screen, and what happens if they finish early. Ten minutes of routine instruction in week one saves several minutes per session for the rest of the year across every group you run.
Weeks Two and Three
10. Finalize and Publish the Schedule
Once you have teacher input and the master schedule has settled, publish your schedule to teachers, the front office, and administration. A visible schedule dramatically reduces interruptions and gives you a document to point at when someone wants to schedule something during a service block.
Build in two unscheduled blocks per week from the start. ASHA's 2024 survey found 79% of school-based SLPs are required to make up missed sessions — assemblies, absences, and testing will consume that capacity, and if you have not reserved it, make-ups come out of your planning time.
11. Calendar the Whole Year's Deadlines
Every annual review, every reevaluation, every progress reporting period, and every Medicaid billing deadline, entered once with a reminder 30 days ahead. This is a two-hour task in August that eliminates the single most stressful category of school SLP problem: the deadline you found out about after it passed.
12. Set Up Screening and MTSS Intake
Decide now how teachers refer a concern to you, and tell them the process. Without a defined intake route, referrals arrive as hallway conversations you will forget, and the ones that mattered will resurface as "I told you about him in September." A simple form or a shared list is enough.
13. Meet the Related Service Providers
The OT, the PT, the school psychologist, and the special education teachers share your students and, often, your scheduling constraints. Twenty minutes with each of them in September prevents a semester of scheduling collisions and identifies the students where coordinated service would be better than parallel service.
By the End of the First Month
- Every student on the caseload has been seen at least twice and has current baseline data
- The schedule is published, stable, and includes protected documentation time
- All compliance risks identified in week one have a documented resolution or a documented escalation
- Every teacher and family has heard from you
- Your note format and data collection workflow are running without you thinking about them
- The year's deadlines are on the calendar
- You have a written record of any assignment that exceeds your capacity, with a proposal attached
The One Thing to Skip
Do not spend the first two weeks on materials, decoration, or building elaborate activity sets. Those feel productive and they are the lowest-value use of August. The clinicians who have a good year are the ones who spent that time on the caseload audit, the schedule, the deadline calendar, and the documentation setup.
Materials can be built in October, when you know what your students actually need. Compliance deadlines and a schedule that does not work cannot be fixed retroactively.