Selectboard approval unanimous

By Danae Moyer

Danra Kazenski has watched her patients struggle not only with speech difficulties but also with social mistreatment because of them, so she decided to take action.

Kazenski, a University of Vermont speech-language pathologist and founder of Vermont Stuttering Therapy in Waterbury, has made it her goal to end the stigma of stuttering. By practicing what she describes as an “acceptance-based model of therapy,” Kazenski works to help patients who stutter accept their speech patterns and live with them.

This month, Kazenski is channeling that theme of acceptance into Stuttering Awareness Week, May 13 to 19, by creating a display of green lights in the Waterbury Rotary. Kazenski asked the town selectboard for permission to mount the display. 

“It’s sea green for stuttering,” Kazenski said during an interview over Zoom earlier this month. “And I have a banner that I’m going to put up.”

Selectboard chair Roger Clapp said members’ approval for the display was unanimous. “I thought it was something the community would enjoy seeing represented,” he said.

Kazenski has lived in Waterbury for seven years. She began focusing on public awareness of differing speech patterns after a patient who stuttered died by suicide at age 12 in 2020. “Your soul goes through things when something like that happens,” she said of her young patient’s death. “I had been looking for a way to give back in a different way.”

That’s when Kazenski decided to open a store next to her practice to raise money by selling t-shirts, mugs, buttons and other products with stuttering-awareness slogans. Her t-shirts read, “Leave no stutterer behind” and “Normalize stuttering.” Kazenski also leads a support group for people who stutter with Barry Guitar, another University of Vermont therapist and expert in stuttering treatment and research.

Sergio Torres, 69, said he has stuttered since childhood and joined Kazenski’s support group. “I had a really severe speech problem,” said Torres, who lives in Waterbury with his wife. “I have stuttered since I was about 4 or 5 years old, but I never really did anything until I was 32 years old.”

The support group, particularly the therapists, have helped, he said. “These people have done a miracle on me, I would say,” Torres said. “They really took me into their hands and they spent years on my speech.”

His success came not just from Kazenski’s clinical work but her approach to her patients, he added. “Danra has just been awesome,” he said. “She is genuine, she’s supportive of us all — men, women, children.” 

Along with spearheading Stuttering Awarness Week, Kazenski started a social media challenge to turn the spotlight on stuttering and normalize it. She asked viewers to post short videos saying either, “I stutter, and I’m worth listening to,” or, for those who don’t stutter, “If you stutter, I’m listening” using the hashtag #normalizestutteringchallenge on her therapy practice’s Instagram accounts.

“I made a very lofty goal of trying to get a million people to do this in a week,” she said.

The challenge began in Waterbury and generated responses from South America, Africa, Australia and Ireland, Kazenski said. She didn’t reach the goal of 1 million participants in a week, but hundreds of people posted videos.

“Young children did it. Their parents did it,” Kazenski said. “I cried every day. It was one of those things where it was amazing how people kind of took to it.”

To the therapist, it was an honor to the young patient she lost — and to those who stutter everywhere.

Danae Moyer reported this story on assignment from the Waterbury Roundabout. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.