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AAC in schools with no budget

A classroom that needs AAC usually needs it on more than one device, for more than one student, starting now — while the funding decision, if there is one, is months away. This is how to put a complete AAC system on every device in a school for nothing.

What it costs

Nothing, at any scale. This is the difference that matters in a school: paid AAC is usually priced per device or per student, so putting it on a class set of ten Chromebooks costs ten times what it costs on one. A free app costs the same on one device as on four hundred, which means the decision stops being about how many students can be justified.

Rolling it out

1. Try it on one device first, with one student and one adult who will actually model it. A system nobody models is a system nobody uses, whatever it cost.
2. Pick the board size once. Grid size is chosen at setup and should not change afterwards — moving the grid moves every word and destroys the motor plan. Growth happens through the vocabulary level, which reveals words in place. How the sizes and levels work.
3. Install it on the devices that stay with the students, not just the ones in the AAC cupboard. Communication has to be available in the corridor and the dining hall, not only in the resource room.
4. Teach the adults to model before you teach the students anything. This is the step that decides whether the rollout works. How to model AAC.

Notes for network and IT staff

• One domain to allow: saythrough.com. The app, its symbols and its voices are all served from that single origin — no third-party CDNs, analytics vendors or font services to allow separately. That is deliberate, because unlisted third-party domains are exactly what school filters block.
• No accounts and no authentication. Nothing to integrate with your directory, nothing to provision in September, nothing to deprovision in July.
• No student data leaves the device. Profiles, boards and message history live in the browser's local storage. Nothing anyone types or says is transmitted, which keeps it clear of most data-protection review entirely.
• Managed Chromebooks can be pushed the app as a web app through the Google Admin console, so students find it already installed. Install steps for every platform.

Making it work in the classroom

The failure mode in schools is almost never technical. It is that the device arrives, sits on a desk, and nobody uses it in front of the student.

• Give every adult in the room permission to be bad at it. Modelling badly beats not modelling.
• Keep it available in every lesson, including the ones that are not about communication. PE and lunch generate more real language than any structured session.
• Use separate profiles per student on a shared device. Each gets their own vocabulary, settings and history, without one child's board becoming another's.
• Print a paper set for the room. Settings → Print outputs the board as it stands, one page per sheet — laminate a few and there is a copy on every table, at no cost per copy. Ready-made sheets are here too.

It also helps while you wait for funding

If a student is going through an assessment for a funded, dedicated device, a free app is not a competitor to that process — it is what they use in the meantime, and it generates exactly the evidence the application needs. "This student used symbol-based AAC daily for four months and initiated multi-word requests" is a far stronger case than a prediction. If the funded device arrives, boards export in Open Board Format and go with them.

What free doesn't cover

Worth saying plainly, because a school makes this decision once. There is no support contract and no phone number — the project has an issue tracker and an email address. There is no training programme and no consultant who will visit. The vocabulary is a researched candidate set, not a clinically validated page set like Core First or PODD. And it will not drive eye-gaze hardware or a mounted speech-generating device. If a student needs any of those, a funded commercial system is the right answer and this is the thing that keeps them talking until it arrives.