Services in the Classroom
December 3, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
There is a speech therapist all day in the autism support classroom at West Creek Hills Elementary School in the East Pennsboro Area School District in Pennsylvania, according to today’s Patriot News. The age range for the class is not specified; an 8-year-old girl, Makayla Zarker, is described as doing well in the class, where she also receives “increased occupational and physical therapy.” Some preschool special education classrooms in my school district also have a speech therapist (and also an occupational therapist) in the room all day (noting that, as this is a room for preschool children, school only lasts for half the day). When he was younger, Charlie was “pulled out” of the classroom to work 1:1 with a speech therapist and, too, with an occupational therapist a few times a week. Currently, Charlie works for a brief period in the morning and another in the afternoon with a speech therapist, who has also trained the teacher and instructors/aides to practice all the speech programs. This arrangement has meant that he ends up working on speech programs—-along with using a language master, activity schedules, and miniature voice recorders— to help him talk without an instructor prompting—-throughout his day, ad he has been talking more and, too, imitating us more, in longer phrases, and with much purposefulness.
Not every child needs so many speech services—–but I am wondering, how are the speech services set up for your child in his or her classroom and school? What kind of model has worked the best for her or him?
My son had pullout services in preschool in Indiana and California. In kindergarten he was considered “at age range” and the services were changed to assessments. He’d get 15 minute pullouts or in class assessments. He didn’t seem to have any services last year, in all the melee.
This year he gets 15 minute pullouts in a group setting. I don’t hear explanations or descriptions of it and I’m not sure of its effectiveness.
In New York State kids with an ASD diagnosis are eligible for pragmatic speech support no matter how verbal they may be, & we’ve been lucky that our school district actually follows through on this. Brendan has been receiving this support since first grade & has been fortunate to have had only 2 different speech therapists in these past 6 years. Most of his support is “push-in”, where the therapist goes into the classroom & works with him as he’s participating in class. Sometimes she helps him with the back-and-forth of conversations with peers, sometimes she assists him in participating in group discussions. When he was younger his therapist mixed push-in with pull-out sessions, usually with another student (not necessarily one receiving speech therapy) & they’d play games while working on pragmatic speech. She also teamed-up with his OT one year to work on some of Brendan’s oral-motor issues, which was a lot of fun, since it involved sour candies & tiny cake decoration candies & sticking tongues out
(I got to participate in some of these). In first grade his speech therapist also talked with his whole class once a month on various topics, such as naming emotions or intensities of emotions (we had the thermometers she drew to illustrate these intensities in his room until quite recently).
We’re lucky that, at Brendan’s school, not only are therapists welcomed in the classes (& out), but kids being pulled for therapy is no big deal. Kids not getting therapy enjoy participating in the games, & it felt particularly good when Brendan’s whole first grade class was benefitting from his speech therapy. We feel he’s benefitting from the speech services & his quarterly reviews have reflected his progress with pragmatic speech skills.
My son is in a partial inclusion classroom within a public school in Massachusetts. He has Asperger’s and receives speech for social/pragmatic speech as do all 7 of the kids in his class. He gets pull-out speech 1x per week in a small group with 1 or 2 of the kids in his class. Because they are all working on many of the same types of skills, I think the speech teacher also coaches the spec ed teacher on how to work on these skills in the class.
In our school district in Canada they only fund speech and language evaluation, but no actual services. So you get on a waiting list to meet with one of the two SLPs, who will tell you that you need speech services (of course you do, or you would not have been referred) but that you are not going to get them. If you are lucky enough to have an autism diagnosis then you can purchase private services with government funds but if your speech problem is not caused by autism, you are out of luck.
In my district, it varies by therapist. Our current speech therapist pulls everybody she can out of class for speech therapy, and only reluctantly provides in-class services for two students.
In my first year of teaching, though, and until one of her speech assistants left, I had several therapists in and out of the classroom providing in-class services.
This year our OTs mix pull-out with in-class services and even provide a whole group activity once a month.
I prefer the in-class model because not only can all of the adults in class see and model what is being done, very often a child’s communication in class is different than it would be one-on-one in a speech room, and it’s a more realistic view of the child’s abilities in a real-life setting.
That said, for certain children for whom generalization is a huge issue, I think a mixed approach is best so that skills can be practiced in a variety of settings.
My son gets push-in therapy in a small group — I have found this is exactly what he needs as his weakness is in pragmatic/social language and he can’t really practice without other kids around.
Ben got pull out speech therapy 2x week and OT 1X up until the end of third grade, often in a small group. He always had the resource room 1 period a day or as needed.
As a teacher, I prefer the intensity and individualization of pull out. You can accomplish a lot in a little time.
I love the Language Master, but wasn’t aware of it.
Thanks for all the responses—-this is the first year that Charlie has had his speech services delivered exclusively in the class room. Last year, the speech therapist started to more actively train the aides, so that they could work on programs more. I was initially hesitant about this new arrangement; some students end up working less with an actual speech therapist, as they do more work on speech program with the aides.
Charlie does almost all of his speech sessions with the speech therapist—I just finished a process of back and forth emailing, observations, questions, to get the speech services specified (also in terms of minutes and frequency) as we felt necessary in his IEP—a drawn-out process, but worth it.
Our daughter was pulled out for speech therapy, OT, PT and Resource Room work all while being in a special needs classroom. Most of the services did not have set rooms to go to. In Indiana and New Jersey I often found her getting services in noisy hallways and OT in cramped, tiny areas. Considering her severe sensory issues I was always advocating for a more reasonable area to do speech thearpy. There were also weeks where I thought she was getting services, dropped in during the alleged service time only to find that the services were not being followed through with. I felt like I had to monitor just to see that the services were actually taking place. For me it felt like advocating was a full time job. Advocating to get her the services was hard and usually the school was cooperative and caring but then when it came to follow through…well, it was not so great.
I’m in Canada. Patrick would get Speech through the school if he had a “speech” problem. Because his problems now revolve around language there are no services for him at all. I could hire a private speech/language therapist, but my respite/support funding could not cover it. Before he started Kindergarten, he got speech and launguage through the treatment centre in our children’s hospital.
My son currently attends a mainstream kindergarten, so he doesn’t get any services there. He receives ST twice a week and OT three times a week at a private center that offers services to special needs children. He works alone with his therapists in specially equiped rooms, especially for sensory integration. So far, I don’t see any dramatic improvement in his speech because of his therapies, but OT and sensory integration are doing miracles with him.
Our son has pullout services for both speech and OT, OT more than speech because he’s doing both motor work and social skills. He also is pulled out for “special ed” one-on-one reading work, and he has to take frequent breaks in the afternoons and walk around with a backpack on to calm down enough for desk work.
My older son has pullout services in speech and OT, about once a week for each. My younger children, in a preschool program, get pullout speech and OT once a week most weeks, and group speech, OT and PT in the classroom each week. (Class size is 6 for each of my 3 kids now.)
When each of them was judged to no longer need physical therapy individually, the therapist told me she’d enjoyed working with them. This is always nice to hear.
They all have the same speech therapist, and we all like her. Occupational therapists get shuffled around more for some reason, but I haven’t had one working with any of my kids who didn’t tell me she enjoyed them.
This article is talking about my sister, MaKayla. She is 10 years old now. We credit a lot of her succes to the Vista School in Hershey, PA. The Vista school is an autistic school, only one in this area, that helped her along the way. She is where she is today because of the hardworking, dedicated teachers there. She also has an amazing support system at home!!
Holly