Staying on the Path to Success

Nolan has been demonstrating wonderful verbal skills for his age (babbling five different consonants and two vowels), which led to his speech language pathologist recommending his discharge from Early Intervention two months after he started the program. I fought that and won, so I was obviously surprised when she suggested reducing services two months after the issue was settled. Luckily we had an IFSP meeting coming up, so I called various sources and found a person who would be a better speech therapist to Nolan (via our local stellar audiologist).

Our (now former) SLP wanted to reduce Nolan down to once per month, then once per week after I argued. With no other options for services in the area (no auditory-verbal therapy, no teacher of the deaf, no cued speech classes), I would really like him to continue his twice weekly sessions.

We are very fortunate with our EI coordinator. She is behind us 100% and has assigned us the speech language pathologist who has worked with a deaf child in the past. Nolan's level of loss is only moderate, but at least this SLP has a background in the needs of these kids. We get to keep our twice weekly sessions and the new SLP starts next week! I am a happy camper.

We did note a couple of "discrepancies" in the testing report written up by our former SLP, including that Nolan responds to all environmental sounds (this is the one area that he is not at age level). She also stated that the reason Nolan was referred to early intervention was for a severe speech delay. His hearing loss was only mentioned in a brief sentence in the middle of the report. This is definitely one that didn't "get" the effects of hearing loss on development.

We have won this battle, and are staying on the path to success for Nolan. With the right supports in place, I know he's going to soar.