Declares it to be the policy of this state that, in order to safeguard the public health, safety, and welfare, to protect the public from incompetent, unscrupulous, unauthorized persons and unprofessional conduct, and to ensure the availability of the highest possible standards of speech-language pathology services to the communicatively impaired people of this state, it is necessary to provide regulatory authority over persons offering speech-language pathology services as speech-language pathologist assistants.