It's over

At least it's over for twelve months! Natalie's IEP, that is. This morning we had the follow-up IEP to just discuss speech, since the school district didn't want to talk about individual speech time for Natalie until she was in the classroom.

Everyone (outside of the district) who I have talked to about this thinks it's crazy. On the one hand, I can understand the position of the school district...it makes sense to see how Natalie does in her new environment, and for her new speech therapist to make a recommendation on what services she will get in the future. Unfortunately, the district didn't set up a protocol to make this happen easily. I get the impression that all the other parents are just accepting what the district says, and not pushing to get the speech services delineated in the IEP.

Anyway, the meeting went really well. The speech therapist showed me her notes on her first three sessions with Natalie, all the different sounds Natalie's making (with all those weird phonetic symbols!) and how Natalie has made more sounds each day she sees her. So Ms. Becky, the speech therapist, plans to use the sounds Natalie has now to make words, and to eventually get her to put those words into a 3-word sentence. That's one of her goals for the next 12 months. And, she recommended continuing with two 20-minute individual sessions each week. I would love for Natalie to have more, but I sensed that this would be all we would get, so I didn't push it. We will pursue additional therapy through our insurance if this isn't enough.

Near the beginning, Natalie's teacher arrived, so we got to talk about coordinating Natalie's sign language and speech between what we use at home and what they use at school. I brought a list of the words Natalie says, and the signs she makes, and demonstrated the approximations of the signs that Natalie makes.

I asked about PECS, and the speech therapist uses extensive picture exchange, but not "the system"...PECS is actually a language protocol, and the therapist and teacher use the picture exchanges, but not the rigorous protocol that was developed for autistic kids to communicate. I agreed to this because it appears that Natalie will eventually speak, so we don't need to work on PECS as her communication system. She will continue to get the benefit from the heavy use of pictures they use in the classroom, to prod her speech.

Last night, Natalie said, "Daddy!" very clearly when Tom came home...the most clearly she's ever said it (usually, it's "Daada" or something like that). We're hopeful that she will continue to make good progress in her speech.