The Faces of Healthcare

THE UNSUNG HERO

Tabani Richards, assistant athletic trainer

When two heavyweight wrestlers collided with each other at a high school tournament, one player fell to the ground and lost sensation in both his arms and legs. Tabani Richards quickly initiated emergency action plans by calling an ambulance and placing the player on a spine board so he could be transported to a nearby hospital.

These life-changing accidents are every athletic trainer’s worst nightmare. While Richards (B.S.Ed. ’09) was shaken by the event, his passion and dedication for helping athletes stay safe and healthy ultimately resulted in a full recovery for the student. “Every athletic trainer takes cervical spine injuries very seriously,” says Richards, who is an assistant athletic trainer for the Buffalo Bills, a professional football team based in New York. “We practice emergency scenarios to prepare for these kinds of things.”

While his work schedule varies depending on the day and season, it’s not uncommon for Richards to work seven days a week when training camp starts in mid-July. With over 50 players on the roster and only five athletic trainers on the team, he is often responsible for rehabilitating multiple players at a time, taping and stretching their limbs before and after practice. While a majority of his work requires face-to-face interaction with the players, Richards also develops treatment plans, completes paperwork, and logs medical information for players to ensure the team’s database is up-to-date. Since he is constantly with the players before, during, and after practice, many of them view him as not just their athletic trainer, but as someone they can confide in.

“We're probably the closest people to these athletes,” says Richards. “Often, we're the first person they come to, whether they have something going on physically or mentally in their world or if they have relationship issues or car problems. We get to really develop some special relationships with these guys just based on trust. They trust us and they value us, and if I don't know the right answers to something, I'm going to steer them in the right direction.”

While an undergraduate student at UGA, Richards fell in love with athletic training when he took a class with teaching assistant Jake Resch (Ph.D. ’10), who is now an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development. Resch’s obvious passion, dedication, and excitement for the field inspired Richards to take all of the prerequisite courses for the athletic training program in the Department of Kinesiology. In 2014, Richards earned his master’s degree from the University of Kentucky where he studied the effects of exercise programs on the strength and endurance of baseball pitchers.

Along his academic and clinical journey, Richards met Ron Courson, UGA’s senior associate athletic director and a pioneer in sports medicine. Courson played a vital role in rehabilitating several UGA athletes, including former baseball players Jonathan Taylor and Chance Veazey—both of whom suffered severe spinal cord injuries. Courson also helped rehabilitate Devon Gales, a former Southern University football player who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a kickoff return against UGA in 2015. While tragic, all of these accidents, as well as the way Courson handled each case, served as an example for Richards. After Richards graduated from UGA, Courson helped him land a summer internship with the San Francisco 49ers. He would later go on to work for several NFL teams including the Chicago Bears and now the Buffalo Bills.

Before joining the Bills in 2018, Richards served as a medical observer for the Southeastern Conference, watching for potential head injuries in football players from the stands and serving as a medical liaison for the SEC’s baseball tournament. Daily communication between athletic trainers and the sports medicine team, says Richards, is critical to forming accurate assessments and ensuring injured players receive the best care. “We have strength and conditioning specialists, psychologists, sports scientists, nutritionists, and so we have to involve everybody just so we are on the same page,” he says. “For example, if a player has an ankle sprain and is doing a lower body lift in the weight room, I don't want to double up on the same exercises he may already be doing in practice.”

When a football game needs to stop because of an injured player, Richards, along with the Bills’ head athletic trainer Nate Breske, must determine the severity of the athlete’s injury in real time. “We want to take our time while respecting the game, but we definitely do what's right by the athlete to get an accurate assessment,” says Richards. “It's a competitive field and we want to win, but we're definitely going to do what's best for that person. We're not going to put somebody in harm's way if we feel like it's not safe for them to continue.” While athletic trainers often operate behind the scenes without praise, the joy of helping players get back on the field after they’ve undergone surgery and rehab is rewarding enough for Richards.

“I grew up in Riverdale, Georgia, and I never in my wildest dreams would have thought I would ever end up in Buffalo, New York,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I have my boss, Nate Breske to thank; he took a chance on me and gave me the opportunity to have the time of my life.”

Tabani Richards, an assistant athletic trainer for the Buffalo Bills, develops treatment plans and logs medical information for players.

Richards on the field during a Bills football game.

Candice Branche, associate probate court judge and full-time magistrate court judge of Newton County, poses in the county courthouse.

TENACITY IS WILLPOWER

Candice Branche, Newton County Magistrate Court Judge, former needs assessment director

With a versatile career spanning from healthcare and Pre-K education to counseling and now law, Candice Branche finds it hard to root herself in one place for too long. Whenever a new passion blossoms in her life, she pursues it wholeheartedly, whether that’s conducting psychiatric evaluations for patients, operating a daycare in South Carolina, or pursuing her juris doctor from Mercer University after spending 10 years in the healthcare industry.

Branche (A.B. ’90, M.Ed. ’92) can pinpoint her life’s interests to three main areas—mental health, drug and alcohol addiction, and juveniles. While her path from community counseling to law is an untraditional one, the lessons she learned along her professional journey heavily informs the way she now conducts her duties as the associate probate court judge and full-time magistrate court judge of Newton County.

After she received her master’s degree in community counseling from the UGA Mary Frances Early College of Education, Branche kicked off her career in mental health at CPC Parkwood Hospital in Atlanta. “The second I left the program, I got a job in the hospital’s intake office conducting first initial assessments,” she says. “I eventually took over the department where medical necessity certifications for managed-care companies are conducted.”

At only 24, Branche became the hospital’s youngest director of needs assessment, supervising a staff of over 25 therapists. In this role, she conducted psychiatric and chemical dependency evaluations and discharge planning for patients. Additionally, she directed the institution’s referral program for all physicians, therapists, and contracted employees and served as the hospital’s liaison to Spelman College for students with mental health issues. Branche spent just over 10 years in the healthcare industry, eventually moving to South Carolina where she continued to work in private psychiatric hospitals as a clinical director, conducting evaluations to diagnose and commit involuntary patients into treatment centers.

It was during this time that she learned the value of working with a diverse group of people from different cultures and communities and to not make assumptions about their lives. “All these experiences and working with all these types of people and scenarios made me who I am today,” she says. “You have to meet people where they are, and as a therapist, I realized that not everybody's had your life experience.”

While Branche treated patients from all walks of life, she felt especially drawn to the children she worked with while on the job. However, she knew she had to intervene before they arrived at her hospital to make a more effective and positive impact on their lives. By buying Gazebo School Daycare in Summerville, South Carolina, Branche and her husband, who also worked in mental health, could provide a safe and nurturing environment for young students living in stressful situations. For 10 years, their private school served over 100 underprivileged children with the help of 15 full- and part-time employees.

When her husband passed away in 2004, Branche moved back to Georgia with her two young children and decided to cross off some items on her bucket list, one of which was to obtain a juris doctor and become a prosecutor. “This was a challenge and I had everybody saying, ‘Why would you go to law school? When you graduate law school, you're going to be 41,’” she says. “And I would tell everyone, ‘Well, I'm going to be 41 in three years either way. I can be 41 and an attorney. I don't think that's going to hurt me.’” Law school was a challenge, both in terms of the subject matter and the new technologies available to her as a student who’d been out of school for over a decade, but she persevered and graduated from Mercer University in 2010.

Even before she passed her bar exam, Branche was offered a prosecuting job in the Newton County District Attorney’s office and began practicing full-time after she became a state bar member a couple of months later. “I was a very different type of prosecutor,” she says. “That's because I was coming from a counseling background, so I realized I needed to protect the community and the victims. I also felt that because I'm an officer of the court, I had a duty to protect the defendants and make sure their rights were not violated. The overall good is to give them the services they need, so hopefully, they don’t reoffend and to monitor them, so that the community is safe.”

After prosecuting numerous felony cases involving child molestation, murder, and sex crimes, Branche was named deputy chief assistant district attorney and continued to conduct trials for misdemeanors and major felonies in the Superior Court. Additionally, she was responsible for all charges presented to juvenile court, which included approving petitions, negotiating pleas, writing motions, and conducting restitution, restrictive custody, and probable cause hearings, as well as traffic offenses.

While she is a strong proponent of holding guilty defendants accountable for their actions, Branche continues to advocate for the rehabilitation of individuals with long-term drug and alcohol addictions, especially juveniles who often reoffend in her court and have underlying mental health issues. To address the cycle of jailing individuals for the same charges over and over again, she helped start the Newton County Adult Felony Drug Court in 2013, and eventually became a trainer and consultant for the National Drug Court Association. In this role, Branche travels to other courts across the nation to create or hold best practices workshops for existing drug courts in their circuits with the ultimate goal of keeping people from reoffending due to drugs and alcohol.

“Serving as a trainer for the National Drug Court Institute is probably one of the most rewarding things, and I feel just very blessed to have been part of that,” she says. “Because of this, I can see the difference. I feel I’ve made a difference for both victims and defendants in how I treat them and through the services we provide in our community, especially for juvenile offenders. The services we provide are much bigger than just getting them treatment—it’s families being put back together if they’ve lost their children to DFCS, it’s a driver getting their license back after 15 years, it’s seeing someone graduate from a drug rehabilitation program two years down the road.”

A SHARED PASSION

Jennifer Alexander and Katie Smith, behavioral analysts

Triple Dawgs Jennifer Alexander and Katie Smith have an innate advantage when it comes to their work in behavioral analysis. Both are former special education teachers who worked at the same elementary school and both are natural problem-solvers, a necessary and invaluable trait when it comes to assessing and treating students with challenging behaviors.

Alexander (B.S.Ed. ’06, M.Ed. ’10, Ph.D. ’14) and Smith (B.S.Ed. ’07, M.Ed. ’09, Ph.D. ’14) met each other while they were pursuing their master’s degrees in special education from the UGA Mary Frances Early College of Education. Almost immediately, the two clicked.

“I think that's when Jen and I figured out how well we work together,” says Smith. “I can still remember doing our first interview together, and Jen asked a follow-up question that I would have wanted to ask. By working together as a team, I feel like we realized, ‘Oh, we can solve the problem much quicker if we're doing it collaboratively.’” Today, the pair work together on a daily basis, applying their experiences in the classroom with the clinical knowledge they gained in graduate school to form the best support plans for their clients.

In 2013, the two co-founded Comprehensive Behavior Change in Duluth, Georgia, an organization that offers a variety of services, including staff development, training and treatment recommendations, program improvement, and more, to help improve the lives of students with disabilities. The organization currently serves over 25 school districts in the metro Atlanta area, as well as several systems in rural Georgia.

By helping other teachers, instructional coaches, paraprofessionals, and administrators develop effective intervention plans and classroom management techniques, the two hope to further influence the students they were most naturally drawn to in their own classrooms. Since Alexander and Smith serve clients with a range of disabilities, from autism spectrum disorder and ADHD to those who are visually impaired or deaf, their process of evaluating and intervening is conducted on an individual basis, with each case tailored to the needs of each school, district, program, or classroom.

As a result, their work schedules vary drastically from day-to-day; one day, they could be driving to a school for a follow-up session on an existing intervention plan, while on another, they could be hosting a training workshop for principals and teachers. “In one district, we’re mapping out plans for their elementary school to support classroom management, as well as teaching educators how to get kids to love being in their classrooms,” says Alexander. “By using proactive and preventative methods, we can ensure challenging behaviors don't occur as frequently.”

A common approach the two use to assess and treat challenging behaviors is to conduct a comprehensive functional behavior assessment (FBA). This involves conducting indirect assessments (gathering information, reviewing data and notes, and interviewing staff sources), descriptive assessments (directly observing a child and recording the cause and consequence of a behavior), and functional analysis (testing a hypothesis to form a decision based on factors related to a child’s behavior). Alexander and Smith also provide functional communication training for students who struggle with expressing their needs verbally and as a result, exhibit problem behaviors.

“We're teaching the child to get access to a particular thing or to get out a word appropriately instead of having the behavior,” says Alexander. “We might use a token economy system, so they’re earning tokens or points for engaging in appropriate behaviors or going a certain amount of time without that behavior, and then they can exchange those tokens for items or a break.”

“Eventually, we start to see the behavior shift where aggression goes down and the communication responses go up, and that's what we're looking for,” adds Smith. “We do a lot of work with creating expectations for students and then holding those students to those expectations.” While they typically see behavior changes fairly quickly, there are several factors that influence how long and often the two need to work with a particular student or teacher, such as the severity of the problem behavior, the teacher’s experience with managing problem behavior, and how long the student has been engaging in the problem behavior.

Ultimately, their goal is to eventually work themselves out of a job, so students and teachers can be successful in class without their support. While some cases may last several years, the small milestones their students make along their journey with Alexander and Smith are what keep the two motivated and engaged. “When a kid has their first day with zero problem behaviors, we’re celebrating and watching the data—and when there are several in a row—we know we're making traction, but at the same time, it's heartbreaking when things don't move as quickly,” says Alexander. “But the feeling we all get when we know a kid is making that progress is what keeps us going even though a lot of the situations are really difficult.”

Smith echoes similar sentiments: “When a kid learns something academic, it’s exciting, but it pales in comparison to a student who was super aggressive and no longer is, and now their parents can take them to the grocery store, or they can go to a restaurant with their family, or they can eat in the cafeteria with their friends and participate in PE. I think those life changes for a child and those collateral impacts on their family opens up a whole new world.

Photo of Jennifer Alexander and Katie Smith

Jennifer Alexander and Katie Smith are co-owners of Comprehensive Behavior Change in Duluth, Georgia, an organization that helps improve the lives of students with disabilities.

Comprehensive functional behavior assessments are among the many services the two offer to assess and treat challenging behaviors.

Jill Rodibaugh is the district special education coordinator and lead speech-language pathologist of the Barrow County School System.

Rodibaugh is responsible for leading three elementary program specialists, 18 speech-language pathologists, and nine elementary schools in the evaluation and treatment of students with disabilities.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Jill Rodibaugh, speech-language pathologist

Jill Rodibaugh developed an interest in speech at a young age. Growing up with an uncle who stuttered inspired her to pursue speech-language pathology at the UGA Mary Frances Early College of Education.

The Triple Dawg received her bachelor’s degree in communication sciences and disorders, as well as a master’s and specialist degree in speech-language pathology from the Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education. After observing several speech-language pathologists practicing in the field, Rodibaugh’s (B.S.Ed. ’01, M.Ed. ’03, Ed.S. ’08) passion for helping individuals communicate more effectively solidified.

Initially, she planned to work with stroke patients with language disorders caused by neurological injuries. However, after completing her clinical training at an elementary school, she experienced a change of heart. “A lot of times with young students, we do a lot of play therapy,” says Rodibaugh. “We use the toys to play games, and we ask them to ‘put it on the house, put it in the house, or put it beside the house,’ so whenever we can incorporate therapy into their play, it's easier to keep their attention and is more meaningful to them.”

Immediately after graduating with her master’s degree, Rodibaugh began working at Holsenbeck Elementary School in Barrow County, Georgia, as a speech-language pathologist. Without a guiding coordinator, she initially felt overwhelmed by her new caseload, but she quickly learned to approach each challenge with a flexible mindset to help each individual student, in grades ranging from Pre-K to 5, meet their unique speech goals.

With approximately 60 students to assess, Rodibaugh could treat a range of disabilities in a single day, from those with articulation, language, and fluency issues, to more serious cases involving students with traumatic brain injuries and cerebral palsy. “A lot of times, we use augmentative and alternative communication and assistive technology with these students,” she says. “We teach them what those symbols mean and to point to certain pictures on their output devices to gradually grow their length of utterance. Kids who can't hit the button because of their fine motor skills can use the device’s eye gaze technology.”

Before forming an intervention plan for her students, Rodibaugh must assess their phonological development, which all children go through as they learn to form and use speech sounds to communicate language. Oftentimes, young students form shortcuts in their speech, leaving out letters in words to make speech easier. However, while most children eventually grow out of this stage, others need therapy to correct their speech. “For example, some students leave out the ‘s’ in ‘star,’ and they might just say ‘tar,’ which for them developmentally is a lot easier,” she adds. “So eventually over time, in normal development, that would correct itself, but sometimes those processes persist beyond when they should and that's when therapy is warranted.”

In 2009, Rodibaugh was named Holsenbeck Elementary School’s Teacher of the Year. During her time there, she also served as a special education staffing coordinator, providing special education training, coordinating referrals, managing grade level meetings, and mentoring teachers.

In 2013, she became the district special education coordinator and lead speech-language pathologist of the Barrow County School System. In this role, Rodibaugh is responsible for leading three elementary program specialists, 18 speech-language pathologists, and nine elementary schools in the evaluation and treatment of students with disabilities. “When I first started my job as an SLP, I was trying to figure it all out on my own,” she says. “I remember my first day and wondering, ‘where do I start?’ and I don't want someone else to feel that way. That’s why I meet with my SLPs every month and depending on our agenda, I usually let them add some items on there if there's something they want to talk about because a lot of times, they may be in a school by themselves and they don't have anybody to bounce ideas off of.”

Additionally, Rodibaugh’s leadership at the county level includes developing and delivering professional learning on a variety of topics. She also serves as the school system’s hearing and vision coordinator, providing trainings for school nurses on how to administer testing procedures.

While her responsibilities are more administrative now, Rodibaugh continues to treat young students with communication disorders on a one-on-one basis at a private practice in the afternoons. She enjoys working closely with both her patients and their parents in this setting and helping them implement strategies to enhance speech at home. From her experience as both an SLP and a special education coordinator, Rodibaugh learned the importance of flexibility and collaborating with others.

“I think a lot of times, people come out of their programs thinking they’re ready to work,” she says. “Yeah, you’re ready, but you're going to learn so much more once you get in the door. I still learn every day from other people who are supportive and hardworking. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, so you need to have an open mind.”