Last Monday, Tom and I went to Natalie's first IEP meeting. We were happy with everything that happened except the fact that they refused to discuss individual speech therapy. The "policy" is that they wait until the kid is in the classroom, and see how they do in the new environment, before deciding what individual speech therapy to provide.
That still wasn't good enough for us, but at some point in the meeting you realize they aren't going to budge, so we retreated for the day and came back to skirmish the next day.
After more phone conversations, today I met with Natalie's future school speech therapist and her new program specialist. I came ready to describe Natalie to someone who has never met her, and talk about her speech history and how she's been blossoming in just the past few weeks...and we don't want to take a break in therapy for fear that she will regress.
The result was that we got added to the IEP that Natalie will have two 20-minute individual speech therapy sessions each week for two weeks, and we'll meet again on December 18 to finalize the speech portion of the IEP. Natalie's new speech therapist will have worked with her for two weeks, and will come with her recommendation for how much individual therapy Natalie needs going forward.
We're still going to "agree except" to the transition of speech services from two one-hour individual sessions to one 30-minute group session, but at least we have some sort of transition plan. And our backup plan is that our insurance pays for speech therapy (although it probably wouldn't be at the clinic where she will get PT, so that will be a pain, to go to another location at another time).
1 comment:
I just found your blog and wanted to ask why is it that Natalie isn't getting speech therapy outside of school also. I have a little boy Michael and he actually gets an hour of speech outside of school also? I don't know where you live but was just wondering why she isn't getting double therapy.
feel free to e-mail me at maslusher@cox.net
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