Last year I got sick of tussling with school SLP and took DD for a private speech eval at our state flagship university's speech and hearing clinic. General eval covered by insurance. SLP there diagnosed dysarthria and expressive language disorder. I then took that back to our district along with a request for IEE in speech.
The most respected SLP in the area - the one most sought after for IEE - actually specialized in pragmatic speech issues not the artilculation issues DD had. I spoke with her, though, and she agreed to do a document review and help determine who would be best to evaluate DD. She and the person handling our case for the district (DD's self appointed 'protector' who has made it her mission to assure that DD gets what she needs after seeing the awful way we were treated by the district a few years ago... - and who is also an SLP) - both agreed that DD really should be evaluated by the big wig oral motor specialist on the other side of our state. Because DD's protector really pushed for it, and also because it was obvious school SLP had totally blown DD's eval and services, the district agreed to pay for both evals as IEE's.
Oral motor guru found that DD's tongue was *very* tied but in a way that was almost impossible to find and sent her on to an ENT for surgery. Local highly respected SLP wrote a detailed report outlining all of DD's non oral motor issues. Her in school speech program now includes 2 hours a week of work on articulation issues and 5 minute sessions twice a day doing the oral motor excercises. Old - not very good - school SLP who insisted DD's issues were purely the result of high rate and low volume - totally dismissing any and all concerns I had about vowel sounds and minimizing issues with /R/, /s/sh/th/, /th/f/, etc went on maternity leave and was replaced (permanently) by very good SLP who DD loves working with... Oh and those rate and volume issues seem to be related to breath support issues - ie, she appaarently tries to get her speech out before running out of air. This is something that needs to actually be addressed by the SLP not just by telling DD to slow down and speak up.
Bottom line I think you once again need to look at IEE. Don't let them take it out of the IEP - instead make the IEP and services more accurately reflect what he needs. HTH
