Summer Decisions

We are coming to the end of the school year, which is irrelevant for Nolan. For Matthew, however, the end of the school year means that services are put on hiatus. He follows the school calendar and thus receives no speech on school holidays or over school breaks.

We had a choice to make. Choice 1 is to press for summer services, because we think with a few more months he might actually declassify and no longer need speech by fall. The problem here is that we would have to prove that he would regress without services, and we haven't seen any evidence of regression. Choice 2 is to go without summer services and pick up speech therapy again in the fall.

We're going with Choice 2, since we don't think he'll regress. Our speech language pathologist isn't quite ready to let him go, either. He's about 60% intelligible to strangers, but should be at 80% or greater intelligibility. Those darn consonant deletions really make his speech difficult to understand!

A typical sentence might be, "I ree wah gee one I ree don' wah blue one I gah abou it." Very run on, and I'm sure most would need a translation:

"I really want [the] green one. I really don't want [the] blue one. I forgot about it."

He's almost 3 1/2, so most of these consonant deletions should be gone by now. We also still have a few sound substitutions, but they're not severe enough to impact intelligibility. Even if he still has some delay, he'll declassify from services because he doesn't have any other issue (like hearing loss) that guarantees the right to therapy. Once he hits the "moderate delay" category, he declassifies. We'll seek private speech therapy if his speech is still "off," of course. I do hope that his speech hits the normal range prior to kindergarten!