Please don't quote me since this will be another deleted post.
DS9 has what I would consider apraxic speech that is related to developmental coordination disorder. His rate of speech is too slow, he has some distorted vowels, inappropriate pitch, sing-song cartoonish voice...basically poor prosody. This was addressed by the school SLP (a different school) back in K-1st grade and he ended up speaking in a monotone. So she fixed the "pitch" and "sing-song" issue but not really other issues. DS originally qualified for speech services with the school because of having a "voice disorder" (which includes prosody issues) plus articulation issues. He was at the 1st percentile for articulation at age 4.
In the last year or so, the latest school SLP has not addressed the prosody issue at all. Her idea of treating it has been to give him cues when the pitch gets out of hand and he starts shrieking (the pitch goes up when he is either trying to talk to someone in a different room, yell--whether angry or not--, or he gets excited or upset). Otherwise, she has not been doing any sort of actual speech therapy at all, because she does not hear any articulation issues. So, it turns out, a year ago, they decided that his 8 hours per month of speech/language in his IEP would not actually be "speech" but it would be a social skills group. She may have been working on the articulation issues, which she couldn't hear, in the social skills group, since it was still in his IEP, but I don't really know. It probably was just for paper only. I knew they were putting him in a social skills group but had no idea they had stopped speech therapy! To make matters worse, she keeps talking about his "fast rate of speech" which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard because he actually speaks way too slow! Even the neuropsych said "rate of speech too slow and dysfluent speech" in his report. So I suspect that the school SLP keeps telling DS to slow his speech down. I confronted her about this and she said that he would not be understandable if he doesn't slow down his speech. I said "But I don't want to encourage abnormal prosody to rectify articulation." She clearly did not agree.
I sent a video of his speech to an SLP who specializes in apraxia. And she was like "Ummm, yeah. Choppy speech, incorrect vowels, articulation errors, definitely not speaking "too fast". I took DS to primary care doc to get a referral for an assessment and he was like "Well obviously there is a prosody issue" and Dx him with "Verbal Dyspraxia" right then and there and gave me a referral. But now it turns out our insurance might not cover it unless I take him to one of two places, and those two places do not include the person who specializes in apraxic speech. This whole thing is incredibly frustrating.
The school SLP clearly does not know what to do with him. I am going to have to pay a large amount of money out of pocket for private SLP even though he qualifies for school services. Do I ask for it to be taken out of his IEP? Because I think it would be very difficult to put back later. But if she works with him and doesn't know what she's doing, we run the risk of her messing up his speech and interfering with what the private SLP does.
Anyone have any advice?
