Peyton's services with our regional center only lasted through his third birthday, so we worked with our local school district to evaluate him for an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). This is a process that takes about 60 days, in which we meet with the school district, give them all available information and evaluations, and then they do their own evaluations. After all the evaluations, we have our IEP meeting. 60 days seems like a long time but, being the end of the school year, families with kids who turn three over the summer also try to get their IEPs completed so that they can start services at the beginning of the next school year. This means that instead of having to process the kids with May birthdays, the school district also has to process kids with June, July, and August birthdays.
Because of this, our evaluations started the week of April 30th. A psychologist went and observed him at Stepping Stones in his Early Intervention program one day. Then, I took Peyton in to be evaluated by the psychologist, the Speech and Language Pathologist, and the Autism classroom's teacher.
To be the mother of a special needs child can be self polarizing. Peyton did extremely well at his evaluation at the school. A little too well, actually. He blew their socks off. The autism classroom teacher was impressed by his knowledge of colors, shapes, puzzles, counting and his alphabet (he can also read numbers and letters). By the end of the hour and half session, they happily told me that he would not qualify for Special Day Class, but the Social Skills class would probably be good for him. The Social Skills class meets two days a week, two hours per day. As there were only six session left in the school year, he will start in September. Since preschool is not required for all children (don't get me started on that), the school district also will not help pay for a private inclusion preschool which we enrolled Peyton in after his Early Intervention class ended. We are actually lucky that our school district has a Social Skills group; others are not so lucky and their kids end up without any services.
On Wednesday, May 8th, Peyton went in for speech and language testing. Since he had already taken the standard language test for ages 0-6, known as the PLS, as part of the Stanford PRT study, she was unable to retest him that day. He did qualify for articulation therapy. He tends to add extra sounds to the ends of his words, or drops sounds from other words, making his intelligibility difficult. There is another language test that can be given, but the child must be three when they take it. Seeing that Peyton was two years, 364 days (it being a leap year and all) on that day, he was unable to take it. We went back for that test (the CELF test) this past Friday.
In the State of California, a child must qualify at most (MOST) 7% on the language test in order to qualify for speech therapy. That's 7% out of 100. The average child should score in the 50th percentile. So, the 7th percentile is very low.
Peyton scored in the 16th percentile in the standard language areas and in the 37th percentile in expressive language. The therapist apologized for not being able to score him higher on some of the questions. I almost laughed out loud. I really wish I would have told her that she shouldn't have accepted many of the answers he probably did give her (see what I mean about being self polarizing?).
We had our IEP meeting on Peyton's birthday, May 11th. As we expected, Peyton only qualified for the Social Skills group and 30 minutes of Articulation Therapy a week. The language testing would tell us if he would also qualify for extended speech therapy, which now we know he will not.
Peyton is doing amazingly well. In the past three months, he's had a vocabulary explosion. He talks all the time, but most of the time we can't understand what he's saying. I probably can understand him the most since I'm with him all the time, but he clearly needs more speech therapy. Not less. James and I are fortunate enough that we are able to enroll Peyton in a private inclusion school, private speech therapy, and private ABA (though we dropped his therapy hours to two sessions a week instead of five).
What upsets me the most is how happy the evaluators were to tell us that he didn't qualify for full services. He's intelligent and adorable, but he needs help. He just doesn't need as much help as other kids.
And, I think of all the other kids who score low in language, as low as the 8th percentile and don't qualify for therapy. Not everyone is able to afford private services. What happens to those kids? What is wrong with our education system????
Okay, back to Peyton's birthday. As you know, Peyton turned three on May 11th. He woke up to all the presents from family and friends and had a blast opening everything. Then James and I had to leave for his IEP meeting with the school district, while he had his last full session of ABA therapy for the week. Then he went to his very last day at Stepping Stones for Early Intervention. The regional center stops funding all services at age 3. We threw him a little party and bid his wonderful teachers, the staff, and all of his friends a very fond and sad farewell. Yes, I cried. I will be forever thankful to the entire staff at Stepping Stones for everything they did for Peyton since he started there last June. I credit them with taking our quiet, nonverbal boy with poor eye contact and social kids and having him graduate talking up a storm, with excellent eye contact and some very good friends! These programs are amazing. Early Intervention works wonders. And yet, their budgets get cut too. (Sorry, I'm having extremely strong, miserable feelings about the education system and special services departments).
Peyton went in for his three year checkup with Dr. Glinder the week of his birthday. Dr. Glinder was amazed at how far Peyton's come with all the services we've provided and the work we're doing with him.
His vitals were as follows:
Height: 37.5 inches (47th percentile)
Weight: 34 pounds (74th percentile)
He's extremely healthy and strong. Though he looks thin, his muscle development is great and his weight is well distributed. He actually looks a little skinny without clothes on.
Here are pictures of him opening his presents.
