Michelle Lassiter, MA, CCC-SLP, is a bilingual speech-language pathologist with 24 years’ experience in hospital acute care, rehabilitation, and outpatient settings as well as within the school system. In the schools, she oversaw the case management of IEPs, collaborating with parents to ensure that their children had the most appropriate services. Michelle also provided direct services to preschoolers with speech and language delays and disorders, supervised graduate speech pathology students, and supported and mentored other SLPs in creating culturally sensitive speech-language assessments and intervention treatment plans for ELL and bilingual students. She developed strategies to encourage participation from immigrant parents throughout the IEP process.
Michelle brings both professional and personal experience to Understood as the parent of a young adult with learning and thinking differences. Her experiences eventually led to her own diagnosis of ADHD as an adult.
Michelle earned her BA and MA in speech-language pathology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was born in New York to Dominican and New York parents, but she grew up in Mexico, Venezuela, and eventually Puerto Rico, completing high school there before moving to Massachusetts for college. After graduation, she lived and practiced in Florida, Virginia, and Alabama. Michelle now lives in North Carolina. She loves the ocean, nature, Latin music, and lazy beach days with her husband and two children.