We had Seth's IEP yesterday. Since I met with his service coordinator last week, I knew what we'd be asking for and that none of it was going to be a problem. We're so blessed in that regard. He has an aide observing him two hours a day for the first four weeks of school so that they can see how he adjusts to the new school, teacher and friends and then that time will be reduced gradually so that he doesn't have anyone with him by November. He'll have in-home ABA therapy twice a week for an hour and a half and we asked for another speech evaluation.

My understanding is that most speech issues should have been grown out of by age 7 and his haven't been outgrown. I knew they wouldn't be since we've been working on the same sounds and problems for the last three years as part of his ABA program and the progress has been minimal. Unfortunately, there are two factors working against us in that regard. One, he is VERY accustomed to "performing" while being evaluated so he watches his articulation during assessments but he doesn't generalize that to his regualar conversations with family and friends. Two, most speech services are given if a child performs below the 7th percentile in speech AND language. So the fact that he has the vocabulary of a 9 or 10yo is going to work against him, even though he sounds like a 4yo when he speaks to his friends. If he doesn't qualify (and I'm beginning to think he won't), the coordinator suggested that we work on some exercises at home. I'm really frustrated since we've worked on these things for so long and it's now being regulated to something I can work on at home with him. If the speech pathologists and therapists can't help him, how am I supposed to???

So I've just vented about all of that but, in reality, I'm quite happy with the agree-ableness (is that a word?) of the teacher and school. His teacher has invited us to tour the classroom before school starts and she's had another student with autism several years ago so she may have some idea of what she's getting into. We'll see...

By Cat on Friday, August 25, 2006 - 03:16 pm:

It sounds like for the most part everything's going well! That's great! I hope he qualifies for the speech. A good evaluator should be able to pick up that he's performing and maybe even "trick" him into being evaluated without him knowing it. I thought for sure Randy would graduate from speech this past spring because he'd pretty much met all the goals that had been set for him. He was still having some problems though and they actually increased his time from 30 minutes once a week to twice a week! I was shocked and thrilled. They said they wanted to correct the problem as much as possible before middle school. Also, with language/vocabulary and autism, isn't it normal to have a large vocabulary? I wouldn't think that would have anything to do with the speech aspect for services. Then again, what do I know. Good luck with everything!

By Tink on Sunday, August 27, 2006 - 11:38 am:

It is going really well. I think that got lost in my rant about the speech therapy. Luckily, I got a call and the speech therapist is going to come in and observe him speaking to his classmates and work in a center with him so he won't know he's being tested and will be using his normal conversational articulation. Usually, with autism, language isn't good but we've spent so much time working on developing his vocabulary that it may end up coming back to bite us in the...hmmm, rear end. *I* don't think the words he speaks should be taken into account if he isn't having trouble with that aspect of language but my understanding is that he'll have to have problems in both areas before he's considered low enough to need therapy. I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed.

I'm glad to hear they are being so proactive with Robin's speech therapy. I'd want to have that worked on before middle school. It's good to hear that his school recognizes the importance of that.