Record enrollment for this year's UI SPEAKS day camp for children and teens who stutter

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

The annual UI SPEAKS camp, a summer day camp program for children and teens who stutter, has seen record enrollment this year.

The UI SPEAKS camp is held at the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic and is sponsored by the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. The camp's name, UI SPEAKS, is an acronym for University of Iowa Summer Program to Educate Adolescents and Kids who Stutter.

The camp, held early every summer, includes a week-long intensive program that combines speech therapy and group activities. Eleven elementary school children and 15 teens are attending the camp this year, from across Iowa and other states. As the campers work on speech strategies, graduate students in the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders also learn valuable therapy skills, supervised by teams of clinical faculty.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.