My child is in 6th grade. I talked with my private speech therapist who we see once a week for writing. She had talked to the new speech pathologist at school about using a program she thinks will give my child good basic skills, which is the Language processing kit. She said the school speech pathologist did not have the program or the funds to buy it and she said that my child’s IEP for speech did not have language goals.The IEP was mostly related to my child’s new found apraxia and sounding out multisyllabic words and recalling and repeating sentences. My private speech therapist also said that my child understands vocabulary and doesn’t need the help of the school speech pathologist for that. So it seems there are two opinions and I am not sure where I should be giving more time.
Re: Speech question on whats important
The IEP states my child demonstrates a moderate receptive language disorder, and a severe to profound expressive language disorder. She also demonstrates multple indicators of a moderate to severe apraxia of speech. Her expressive language is characterized by omissions of grammatical morphemes, auxiliary verbs including copula” is” and” to be” especially in contracted forms, interrogative word order errors.These errors are also those that indicate a motor speech disorder. She does much better when imitating, she improves rapidly with repetitive pracice within minutes, her intelligibility breaks down in direct correlation to any increase in length or complexity of the word/phrase, mulitisyllable words;phrase are the most difficult The relative contribution of the speech disorder may indeed be greater than that of her language disorder.
The private tutor says that my child demonstrates normal receptive vocabulary but struggles to categorize information and associations.
I am thinking of changing my work schedule so I can pull her for outside therapy in reading, writing, and speech ,so I am trying to make sure that I am putting more time into the most appropriate treatment.
Re: Speech question on whats important
I’d pull in the outsiders myself; this is the kind of situation where you could put all kinds of effort just to get something resembling a good IEP… and it would be a lovely piece of paper in a drawer. You’re not going to create a setting and time and resources for the intervention to happen. My guess is that speech is what they have on their menu, so that’s what sixth graders who are sort of almost making it need (by their definition).
You will have to call another IEP, ask for another assessment to test for language deficits. If they are found then the SLP at the school will create goals for the language deficits. When the original IEP was held what was the focus of the meeting? Was it that she couldn’t pronounce words, she couldn’t process auditorially? If it was more into the articulation/auditory piece then maybe the SLP at the school just focused on Articulation/auditory processing as an area of deficit.
The private SLP seems to be treating a language based deficit but on the other hand, she states your daughter understands vocabulary then what kind of LANGUAGE based deficit does she have? All of my language based kids struggle BIG TIME with vocabulary, unless they are ADD. Then their vocabulary is hit and miss depending on when they are tuned in and tuned out.
There are many ways to treat language based deficits. One doesn’t need to “purchase” a ready made kit from Lingui Systems. Yes, it makes it easier for the outside SLP to just purchase a kit from Lingui systems that addresses language processing but the problem here is the SLP at the public school needs to have goals and objectives that are tied to the current academic/curriculum standards of NCLB…I don’t think the language processing test is tied to government mandated curriculum standards.
When I came into a new district the tests were antiquated, I had NO therapy materials except for what I have collected over the years. This year alone I have spent over $700.00 of my own funds to outfit my speech and language caseload. I still have to purchase tests and protocols and just pray that they will reimburse me for said expenditures.