Diane joined Oakland Schools in 2006 after working for seven years as a speech and language teacher in a local district.  Diane worked with students, families, and school staff to support the communication, speech and language skills of students with IEPs as well as students at-risk for learning difficulties.  In her role as a speech and language teacher, her work focused on speech and language disorder assessment, intervention, and program design, as well as whole-class and small-group instruction designed to prevent language-based learning difficulties in school-age students.  Diane is a Spartan through and through, with both a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in Speech-Language Pathology from Michigan State University.  She also holds her Michigan Professional Teaching Certificate, her Michigan Speech-Language Pathology License, and her Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA).

In her role as a speech and language consultant in the Special Education Professional Learning Unit at Oakland Schools, Diane supports educational speech-language pathologists and special educators in their ability to improve student achievement and engagement in order to close the achievement gap between students with and without IEPs.  She facilitates professional learning around communication, speech and language development, early literacy skill development, and setting goals, progress monitoring, and visually-displaying data to guide intervention for language and literacy skills.  Diane is also a member of Oakland Schools’ multi-disciplinary Response to Intervention – Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (RTI / MTSS) literacy team.  She works collaboratively to support school building leadership teams who are exploring, attending to consensus, building infrastructure, and/or implementing an RTI-MTSS framework to improve the literacy skills of all students.

Outside of the office, Diane enjoys spending time with her husband (also a teacher!) and two young children, reading fiction, and sailing.