Part of the closing College of Saint Rose’s speech pathology program has a new home in Albany.
Russell Sage College is taking over the Winkler Clinic’s Aphasia Center and the gender-affirming voice program as nearby Saint Rose closes under financial pressure amid declining enrollment. Russell Sage also announced bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in communication sciences and disorders on Tuesday, the first of which is set to start in fall 2025. Incoming Director Julie Hart says the program is vital to brain injury and stroke patients.
“Approximately one-third of people who have stroke will develop the symptom of aphasia. People can also develop primary progressive aphasia from degeneration of the brain. And those are people we will serve as well. People with aphasia find that participating in their lives is oftentimes so challenging, that it leads to isolation, depression, and poor access to appropriate health care due to challenges communicating with health care providers, challenges communicating with family and friends and their pre-existing community,” Hart said.
Hart says of the 60 people in the neurological services, or neuro, program at Saint Rose who went to the center, 30 will be moving to Russell Sage, with the remainder transferring to Living Resources, which is led by a former Saint Rose clinician.
Hart says Russell Sage is opening the doors to the clinic to train healthcare workers statewide.
“We are in contact with other colleges in the state that do offer Communication Sciences and Disorders programs, and those colleges will be sharing their students with us to do their clinical internships,” Hart said.
College president Christopher Ames says the move came in response to public concern the center’s services would be lost from the Capital Region with Saint Rose’s closure.
“We also heard it from Saint Peter's that their clinic was populated by people coming out of the graduate program at Saint Rose, and they were concerned about their future ability to be able to staff those positions. So we were interested in it from the beginning,” Ames said.
Kristin Seaburg, Executive Director of Saint Peter’s Health Partners and Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital, thanked the college for stepping in.
“We are grateful to Sage for their commitment to recruiting and educating the next generation of speech therapists while building their own storied legacy of preparing students for distinguished careers in the health sciences and nursing,” Seaburg said.
Matt Latiolais is a client with the program. He says Saint Rose saved his life after an accident in a Vermont lumber mill over a decade ago.
“Boards stuck on the roller and fell and cut my left temple right there- it shattered my left temple,” Latiolais said.
It left Latiolais, who’s in his 40s, unable to speak and barely able to move. He has Broca’s aphasia – a type of aphasia which, according to the National Aphasia Association, leaves comprehension intact but makes putting spoken words to thoughts more challenging.
As part of his ongoing recovery, he was inspired to make one-handed tools for others like him, as well as videos about his daily life.
“[A] whole bunch of stuff, from walking, meditation or nutrition,” Latiolais said, in addition to videos showing what it’s like to travel as a person with a disability.
Hart says aphasia is different for everyone, but often:
“There's definitely the idea of a noun, like the name of something that is really hard for someone that kind of like the word is on the tip of your tongue. That that's very common. It's challenging to use verbs. It's challenging to use word tenses, but the person understands,” Hart said.
Jack Pickering is the incoming codirector of the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at Sage. He says the center and the two new degree programs are key to supplying the Capital Region and beyond with speech and language professionals.
“The undergraduate program, which we'll be building over the next few years, has to provide a good scientific background for our students. So when they study in their master's degree, they'll be prepared. We also have the circumstance where we'd like to package some courses for people in other departments who may be interested in studying to be a speech language pathologist at the masters level,” Pickering said.
The speech therapy clinic is set to open July 8th, with the master’s program scheduled to begin in fall 2029, in time for the graduation of the first class of undergraduates.
