We're having a busy week this week. Lilli has joined 4-H this year, so we had our Club's business meeting, the "Cloverbud" project meeting, and Poultry project meeting all this week. 4-H is really neat - the kids are the officers of the club and run the meeting. They also practice doing presentations to groups of people, starting with their project groups and working up as they get older. Lilli has really matured in the last year in terms of her self-confidence and her ability to interact and converse with non-family members. I'm hoping that 4-H will help her to hone those public speaking skills. Our 4-H club did a fund-raiser at a local Christmas craft fair - selling mistletoe and small wire angels. I was very proud of Lilli when she was able to go with a friend around the craft fair selling these items out of a basket. She helped our club raise quite a bit of money.
Our current hot debate is over whether to continue Michael's speech therapy. Once Michael turned 3, we lost funding to cover his private ST in Fresno. He loved his ST, Maria. Whenever we go to Fresno, he asks if we can go see her. Now he has ST with the school district. I don't know who decided that schools should have the responsibility of providing therapies to special needs children. Whoever it was should have been tarred and feathered. In theory, each child should have an individualized plan, based on their needs. In reality, our school district is short on money, facilities, and staff. So each child gets a token amount of therapy. Michael's ST takes place in a room smaller than our laundry room (which is not big) that also serves as his therapist's office. The District provides no material for the therapist, so any toys or manipulatives are what she has left over from her kids or picked up at a yard sale. The therapist herself persists in presenting Michael with worksheets and flash cards. After 5 months, he still will not work with her. Just last week she gave us a 145 page workbook solely on the /k/ sound. A workbook written for grades K-3. Sigh. She just doesn't "get" preschoolers. Since the District-provided education is not appropriate for Michael, we could have him re-evaluated, initiate a hearing, and get the District to pay for private placement. Or we could pull him now and in a couple of years, if he still had speech delays, we could enroll him in the neighboring District's homeschool program and be eligible for ST in the neighboring county (which has a larger population and income base, hence, better services). Decisions, decisions.....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
How frustrating! This reminds me of the time I was encouraged to have your hearing tested after a long siege of ear infections when you were in Kindergarten or 1st grade. Without trying to establish rapport, the audiologist marched you to a quasi-telephone booth, slapped huge earphones over your ears, and would not allow me to accompany you or talk to you. Needless to say, it was an exercise in futility.
Erica was in speech therapy for a while, from K - 2. It seems like the in-school support is fine for those children with mild problems, but more severe difficulties probably need more than the school can provide. As I recall she had group speech therapy, and all the kids were working on different sounds. How many sounds is Michael missing ? Maybe that would be a case for the district to move him into private therapy.
It's hard to say what sounds Michael is missing. There are many that he can say in isolation or sometimes at the beginning or end of a word but not in another place in a word. He has all the consonants in isolation but has problems with /t/, /k/, /s/, /g/, /p/, /f/, /l/, /p/, /r/ and all blends. He's got some tricky problems to deal with.
Unfortunately there are no local speech therapists. The closest is 60+ miles away. This is one of the trade-offs for living in a rural area - fewer services, especially for children.
Post a Comment