Help! Need IEP help for today (Wednesday)

[Guest guest]

I'm going to try to keep this brief if possible!

For some background, my son was diagnosed by his current SLP as " suspected

apraxia " in January. He didn't have enough speech for her to be more definitive

in her official diagnosis, but in her words to me " he's definitely apraxic " .

Not only that, but he's also been seeing the director of our speech center for

the past two months while our SLP is on maternity leave, and she concurs with

the CAS diagnosis. AND, another SLP from last summer mentioned a CAS diagnosis

as well (she worked with my son for 8 months last year), and the SLP from the EI

program came out to meet with my son last summer and also said his speech issues

are related to motor planning problems.

My son turns 3 today, and he's having a continuation of his IEP meeting today at

1:00 PDT. The first meeting was 2 weeks ago, and we met for FOUR hours, and had

to schedule a continuation meeting for today because we couldn't go any longer

that day.

A lot of that time was just going over his assessments (I wasn't convinced they

got an accurate assessment of his true abilities because my son is fairly shy

and takes a long time to warm up to people), so I spent a fair amount of time

trying to give them an accurate picture of where I think he's at. Then we got

stuck on his goals -- I felt they were too easy given that they're goals for the

whole year, not to mention, if the goals are easy, then it gives the school

district a way out of providing individual therapy.

Which takes me to my main sticking point with them -- they offered NO individual

therapy for him. Zilch. And they won't offer it (even after I asked - nicely -

and despite the written recommendation of his current SLP through EI -- she

recommended 5 days of 45 minute individual sessions and provided documentation

from the apraxia-kids site for them as well.

What they're offering is this: 2 hours, twice a week, of a general preschool

class with other " language " impaired kids (the main purpose of the class is to

work on language goals, not speech goals). Also, a phonology class that meets

for 1 hour, twice a week. During this class, they spend the first 20

minutes-ish working on the sound of the week -- teaching the kids how to place

their mouths/tongues/etc. and how to make the sound, and then reading a story

that uses a lot of words with that particular sound of the week. Then the kids

move to a table to color a word book to take home, and while they're doing that,

each child gets pull-out time with the SLP to work on their goals. There are 8

kids in the class, so you've got 8 kids dividing up 35 minutes or so for their

individual time -- so that's roughly 4 minutes of individual time per class to

work on goals.

And that's it. Not to mention, the phonology class may work on sounds that are

far beyond my son's ability -- the week that we had my last IEP meeting, they

were working on the " sp " sound. My son can't even say a word with the " s " sound

in the first position, let alone a " sp " sound.

ARGGG! The school is arguing that " you'd be surprised at how well kids pick up

language/speech in a group setting with their peers, and I bet you he'll start

speaking like crazy once he starts this class " . When I point out that that

might work for a child with a simpler speech *delay*, but how will that help my

child with a *motor planning disorder*, they don't have an answer. They just

keep changing the subject and going back to their pat answer about how great

peer interaction is for getting kids to speak. (My son has 2 older sisters,

btw, and is around kids all the time; lack of peer interaction isn't an issue.)

So my question is this -- how do I get them to provide any sort of individual

therapy?? Because the way I see it now, the classes they're offering him --

while they might be good classes for working on general language skills, and to

a small extent his speech in the phonology class -- don't offer him any sort of

SPEECH help.

Any advice on how to proceed with them?

Thanks!