My son has PDD-NOS. He is 7 years old. He gets OT, PT and they dropped him from speech. I thought kids who are on the Autism spectrum should receive speech. The school tested him for pragmatics and say he is fine. So they don't recommend speech. They said he just needs a social skills group which I have got them to start in the fall on his IEP.
I also was told that on his IEP he should be classified with Autism if he is diagnosed with PDD-NOS(he would get more services). I tried to get that on his IEP but the school said he doesn't need to be classified with it and PDD is NOT Autism. He is high functioning but does not have Aspergers because of his delays.
So should I fight to get him back into speech and should he have Autism on his IEP? Right now he has Multiple Disabilities on his IEP because he also has Non-verbal Learning Disability.
Sandy
I would ask the school for a copy of the scores of the speech test they gave your son. In my state, students don't qualify for speech services unless their score on a standardized speech test falls 1 1/2 standard deviations below the mean. This means they would have to have a standard score of 77 or below on the test, which translates to about the 8th percentile. This means that 92% of kids his age would have better speech than that child. So in my state, you can still have very poor scores on a speech and language test, but still not qualify for speech.
So, you want to know what the score was on the test, and you also want to ask how low does the score have to be to qualify for speech services. I think it would also be a good idea to ask for an independent evaluation from the school, or if you can afford it just go ahead and get one on your own. This way you will have an opinion from someone knowledgable that won't be influenced by the school.
I don't think it is necessarily a given that all kids with autism should receive speech, I think it depends on the kid, and whether they need it. I think at some point all kids with autism do need speech services, since difficulty in speech and language is one of the hallmarks of the disorder. However, it is possible that by the age of 7, a child might have progressed to the point where speech services are no longer necessary.
As far as whether Autism is on his IEP, I'm not sure. It really shouldn't matter what diagnosis he has on his IEP, he should be given services to target his specific learning and developmental defecits. However, I have heard that in some school districts, there is a difference in services depending on the diagnosis. I would try calling your local Autism Society and ask about getting a parent advocate that could help you with questions like that which are specific to your school system and state.
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Some school districts put down pdd-nos as developmental delays. My youngest one has three disabilities on his IEP, and he has pdd-nos. Where as the oldest one has autism on his IEP and he does have autism. On the speech thing, with Jeffrey the first school he went to said he mastered the speech parts and dropped them from his IEP. When he switched to the second school, they said he hadn't mastered any of them and they had no idea why they dropped them from the IEP. So it was added back to the IEP. Both of my kids still get speech services thru their IEP.
Tammy