Recently I have heard two absurd excuses not to give speech therapy. The first was that the difference in cognitive ability and speech was not two years apart. The second was that the child's speech ability had plateaued. Both of these excuses were delivered convincingly, but neither made sense. Then there was the excuse they used for my daughter, which was also a bunch of "hooey" as Great Grampa would say!. Here is why...
If a child has no speech at three years old it is very difficult to be sure of their cognitive ability, especially when one has not done a proper evaluation of their cognitive functioning, and especially if that testing was not done with a test for a person who is non-verbal. Most schools do not do non-verbal cognitive tests on three year olds, probably because they don't want to lose their excuse for not giving speech. Secondly, how will that cognitive ability go up any time soon unless the child gets additional assistance to understand the world around him or her? Speech therapy would be vital to ensure that the child's cognitive ability increases. This is certainly a way to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't give the child what they need so they won't progress so that you can continue to deny them the services they most need. In addition, not helping a child to learn to understand and to speak will be a sure way to create behaviors which will make it even harder for the child to benefit from any pitiful services that are eventually offered thus completing the fulfillment of the prophecy.
Then the plateau deal. This was the child's first assessment with this SLP, and she had no records from which to make any judgments. How could she determine if he had plateaued without knowing where he was a year ago and a year before that and so on? Wouldn't a plateau infer that the child had been progressing and then stopped? It seems to me that the "plateau" line is a well rehearsed excuse to avoid giving services. This time the excuse came from a Kaiser SLP. This child's mother had heard that line before from the school, prior to his recent increases in ability to articulate and gains in overall speech thanks to his new communication device on the iPod touch. It's too bad the Kaiser SLP didn't know the meaning of the word plateau or she might have tried a more convincing excuse!
And finally, the one that made me laugh, but really wasn't funny. The excuse for not giving my daughter speech was that she wasn't making "meaningful sounds". Okay, so she can make sound, which is the first thing a person needs in order to make speech. But they weren't meaningful...well, then isn't it their job to help the child turn the un-meaningful sounds into meaningful sounds? Isn't that a lot of what speech therapy is? Of course it is!
The lesson I take away from all these shenanigans is - If it seems like a stupid excuse, it probably is just that - just a stupid excuse. If it doesn't feel realistic it's time to ask for an IEE. Get the input of an expert who has nothing to gain from denying your child services.
Okay, here was the only really stupid comment from our successful IEP meeting of yesterday. This was made by the SLP - "I think that three half hour sessions of speech is too much for a child in kindergarten, he will be pulled from class too much and miss valuable class time." My response - and amazingly I was able to say this without any attitude or sarcasm in my voice, 'Well since he is going to be in Independent Study and I will be his primary teacher I'm not worried about that, Im not giving him any less instruction because he is in speech." Sometimes we just have to be present enough to realize when what is said is a "canned response" and doesn't make any sense in the situation we are addressing.
ReplyDelete