David Krupke landed at SAU 10 years ago, having just retired from a 40-year speech therapy career with the Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency (AEA).
"When I walked on campus the first time," Krupke said, "I got a chill. I thought back to my high school French teacher who is responsible for me being in this profession."
As a teenager, Krupke had a natural ability to replicate French sounds and accents, and his instructor pointed that out.
"'You have a good ear for sound,' she told me," Krupke continued. "That was prophetic because that's what speech-language is about...and I'm in the field that she said I would be good at."
Earlier this year, Krupke's colleagues in the SAU Master of Speech-Language Pathology (MSLP) program nominated him for the prestigious Neil VerHoef Award. Since its establishment in 2000, only nine others have received this award. It's bestowed upon a member of the Iowa Speech-Language-Hearing Association "who [has] made significant contributions to the Iowa Speech-Language Hearing Association, the professions of speech-language pathology and/or audiology, or to individuals with communication disabilities."
In the collective nomination letter to the VerHoef family, MSLP Clinical Instructor Brian Foy wrote the following:
While Dave and I were at the AEA together, Dave was an integral part of the preschool "Diagnostic and Evaluation" team. Dave worked with other professionals to assess the communication skills and determine eligibility for countless preschoolers, age birth to 5, in the Iowa Quad City area. Many children and their families benefited from his knowledge and dedication to this team. Likewise, his colleagues looked to him for guidance when having to make instructional recommendations and decisions.
During his 50-year career, Krupke's accomplishments and impact in the speech-language and linguistics field are far-reaching and ahead of his time. In the 1980s, he was on a national committee on technology, and was also a founding member of the Technology Research Group (TRG), a band of speech-language therapists who wanted to use computer programs as a part of therapy. As one example, the TRG utilized programs on floppy disks that analyzed language samples. This was on the cusp of computing technology, so the group wanted to expand their reach and provided sessions at speech-language conferences to share how to use the program.
Subsequently, Krupke and the executive committee of the TRG started an annual conference for speech-language pathologists who used or were interested in using computers in speech-language therapy. For the next 20 years, it was the only state-wide technology conference dedicated to speech-language pathologists in the U.S.
"Dave founded a newsletter put out by the TRG," said another SAU colleague, Jeffrey Knox. "He was instrumental in planning yearly conferences where the newest computer technology was explored. ...Dave helped provide professional development to various AEAs in Iowa to help staff with computer use, including computerized Individual Education Plans (IEP), and in assessment and intervention planning."
In his lengthy career with the AEA, he coached teachers through professional development that focused on Visual Phonics, an innovative gestural system that develops speech and foundational literacy skills of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phoneme production.
Krupke's decades of service-work with K-12 teachers across the Mississippi Bend AEA is strikingly similar to his teaching responsibilities at St. Ambrose – except now he's passing knowledge to others before they become teachers. The expert creates more experts.
"After all of the experience I've had all these years, I now have the opportunity to share it with our graduate students," Krupke said. "It couldn't be more fun or more gratifying."
"I have had an office next door to Dave for nearly 10 years," writes MSLP chair and colleague Rachael Suddarth. "During that time I have grown as a speech-language pathologist observing his passion, care, and dedication to our field. Dave is an outstanding man who, thankfully, is my friend, colleague, and model. The world needs more people like Dave Krupke."
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