School districts have a special word that means that the child gets NO SERVICES but you aren't told that. That word sounds great, but in truth is meaningless, it is COLLABORATIVE. Collaborative speech services as I now understand it means, the SLP talks to the SDC teacher once per week regarding all children in the class for 30 minutes. We were told this meant that the SLP would be working with our child and with the teacher to assist the teacher to encourage proper speech when the SLP was not there. But when push came to shove and we could document that our child had not received speech services for four months and we filed a compliance complaint with the state board of education it was a big WIN! For all the other kids in the school. Our child was given one hour of compensatory speech to make up for the entire four months of missed sessions since "collaborative" means nothing in a legal sense. I am thrilled that the other kids got what they deserved but I would have liked for my daughter to have gotten what was promised instead of meaningless chatter with the classroom teacher.
We were deceived so we signed IEP’s that did not give what was promised verbally. This is covert deception using “district-speak” which deceives parents into believing their kids will get services that the district never had any intention of giving in the first place.
We have since worked with an Occupational Therapist who insisted on using the term "collaborative" and we agreed to use the term only under very strict guidelines that are spelled out in our IEP notes. At least 25 minutes of each half-hour must be one-to-one therapy with no more than 5 minutes of each half-hour being collaborative.
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