Premier Provider of Remote Evaluation and Teletherapy Services Honors Select School Districts for Exemplary Service to Students
Presence Announces "Partner of the Year" Awards for 2024-2025 School Year
NEW YORK, April 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Presence, a leading provider of PreK–12 remote special education-related and mental health evaluation and teletherapy services, today announced winners of its "Partner of the Year" awards for the 2024-2025 school year. The awards recognize school partners that have demonstrated exemplary service to students. The winners represent urban, suburban, rural, and virtual school communities.
"Ensuring every student receives the special education-related services they need is not just a goal—it's a necessity. In the last school year, 7.5 million students in the U.S. were identified as requiring special education-related services, but there simply weren't enough clinicians on staff locally to cover the need," said Kate Eberle Walker, CEO of Presence. "Our Partner of the Year award honors the schools that are overcoming this challenge by creating remote service solutions. These districts serve students with diverse needs across varied educational settings, yet we see a common thread in the commitment they all have made to innovate to ensure student success. They are going above and beyond every day to provide every child access to the services they need to learn, grow, and thrive."
The school districts were selected for the award following a comprehensive nomination and evaluation process. The winners include:
- Calexico Unified School District (California): Facing ongoing challenges with finding bilingual speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and high provider turnover, CUSD tapped Presence to augment their on-the-ground team with teletherapists—providing speech therapy to almost 130 students across 11 schools. Through innovation, collaboration, and a student-focused approach, this partnership highlights how districts can use teletherapy to empower all students to learn and thrive inside and outside the classroom.
- Hendry County School District (Florida): Flexibility and open communication are at the heart of HCSD's partnership with Presence, ensuring students receive the speech and language support they need—even as district needs evolve. The ability to quickly adjust services is key to HCSD's success, with parents and staff seeing firsthand the positive impacts of teletherapy. This year alone, Presence delivered over 5,300 sessions and 157,000 minutes of therapy to HCSD, supporting nearly 370 students. The district's collaborative approach showcases how rural districts can use teletherapy to provide high-quality student services.
- Learning Network (Virtual): Working with Presence since 2015, Learning Network has expanded access to assessments, speech-language services, occupational therapy, and behavioral mental health support—even for its bilingual students. Together, this year's partnership supported nearly 500 learners with over 89,000 minutes of teletherapy.
- Mobile County Public Schools (Alabama): In Alabama's largest school district, student needs are increasing, but staff to support these needs are not. Presence clinicians support the onsite team by providing seamless services to ensure student assessment needs are met. Each summer, Presence clinicians handle gifted testing, reducing the workload for district providers during the school year.
- Monahans-Wickett-Pyote Independent School District (Texas): A small district in West Texas, MWPISD takes pride in its steadfast community of dedicated administrators, teachers, and staff. Presence supports them to enhance speech and occupational therapy services, using tailored teletherapy services to provide support to bilingual students. Strong district leadership and open communication empowered this year's partnership, resulting in over 8,500 minutes of impactful therapy sessions.
"We partnered with Presence because my own son was receiving services from Presence in another district. When I learned his services would be delivered via teletherapy, I thought, well, that's interesting. I reached out to his school to observe and thought, this is very effective. If we ever need this in Calexico, I'd consider Presence," said Dennis Price, special education director at Calexico Unified School District. "Now, we're working with them, and it couldn't be going better for our staff and students."
Nakia Brown, supervisor of psychological services for Mobile County Public Schools, also praised the district's partnership with Presence, stating, "I've been here almost 10 years and can attest to the difference Presence has made."
"We find that every single year our number of evaluations needed is increasing while our staff size does not," Brown said. "Not only is the volume of evaluations increasing, but the depth as well, requiring more time to ensure we are appropriately evaluating our students. The volume, depth, and breath of assessments have pulled our staff in many different directions. [The Presence clinicians] save our staff time and allow our team to push in and focus on needs at the school level."
Since its founding in 2009, Presence has partnered with over 10,000 schools in 47 states. It has delivered more than 7 million teletherapy sessions to students across the nation to date, with more than 1 million sessions in the last year alone.
The Presence therapy platform used in each session is designed by clinicians, for clinicians, with the goal of enhancing the human connection between a therapist and their student. Today more than 2,000 clinicians across multiple disciplines, including speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, school psychologists and mental health professionals, utilize Presence's online platform to support the full spectrum of their work—from case management to planning to therapy delivery to documentation. The platform has thousands of digital learning resources, games and activities, including materials from well-known therapy content publishers and a breadth of curated assessments from marquee test publishers.
By using Presence's network of clinicians to provide secure, efficient, and engaging online therapy solutions, schools have been able to reduce heavy caseloads and help more students reach their Individualized Education Program (IEP) and mental health goals.
About Presence
Inspired to drive solutions for the national shortage of school clinicians, Presence is unlocking the potential of schools and clinicians by removing traditional barriers to success through an elevated approach to teletherapy. As a trusted leader since 2009, Presence is innovating how schools assess and address student special education-related and mental health needs. By equipping a nationwide network of teletherapy providers with award-winning technology and end-to-end clinical support, Presence is helping to meet the needs of schools, students, and clinicians today—wherever they are. Presence is teletherapy, elevated.
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SOURCE Presence