Special Education-Special Indeed Part 2

What do you do when your child’s special education test results show he is significantly delayed in many abilities? One mom’s story continues about what intervention she chose for her child.

Our Journey Continues

As I said, Kurt’s results were devastating to me as a mother. His results showed moderate delays in adaptive/self help (toileting, feeding, dressing), and a moderate delay in expressive communication (conveying wants/needs). Kurt had a significant delay in receptive communication (understanding language). To be specific, CLINICALLY significant. What?!?! I felt like I just had a kick in the teeth.

As a result we decided to start in-home speech therapy through Rise Intervention. When we started the process, we were under the impression the state picked up the cost for services through their Child Find program. Boy were we wrong. The cost was an astounding $80 per hour, $40 of which we were responsible to pay for each visit. Because of this, we could only afford one hour every other week. Kurt only received five visits, showing little to no progress. The lengths his speech teacher went through just to get him to sit still left him with about two minutes of actual work time. She tried work out balls, toys, light up objects, holding him, and weighted blankets. I felt like my world was collapsing around me. Not to mention, that in this time I had another son and was suffering considerably from the baby blues.

When Kurt was almost three, I took him to a pediatric psychologist, Carlson Roth. Now, if you don’t take lightly to hearing that you suck as a mother and your child is royally effed, then I wouldn’t recommend this step. I was told Kurt was a “moving target, had a short attention span, extremely high activity level, impulsive, low tolerance, inattentive, easily distracted, and difficult to direct.” All in all, this meant that Kurt had severe ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, sensory processing disorder, and a significant speech delay. And breathe…holy cow. Did I do anything right for my child?