ARD meeting number 1

Well, it’s official–Jacey Dae is signed up for speech.

Kellen went to work late today (after missing work for jury duty yesterday!) so he could come to the ARD meeting with us. ARD stands for Admission, Review, and Dismissal–this being our first meeting, it was our admission meeting. We’ll have review meetings at least once a year to evaluate her progress and then a dismissal meeting when she’s all done with the special education program. For this first meeting, we met at our elementary school with an assistant principal and Holly, the speech pathologist who evaluated Jacey a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the meeting was at 8 am, so we had to rush to get up and ready and there, meaning Rylan hadn’t eaten and Jacey was sleepy and whiney, but that’s beside the point.

First of all, Holly went over the results from Jacey’s tests. In the written report, there is a list of all the errors Jacey made on the CAAP (Clinical Assessment of Articulation and Phonology), which is what tested her articulation and phonology, whatever that is. I was shocked to see how many errors there were! I mean, I knew she had problems with speech, but seeing it all listed out like that was surprising.

After that, there is the analysis of the test results. Here’s where it gets kind of technical, so if you’re not interested, the important thing to know is: Jacey has some speech patterns that need to be corrected.

For those of you who know about speech, here are the details: Each pattern was listed with the percentage of time it occurred. It’s only considered clinically significant if the pattern occurred more than 40% of the time.

Final Consonant Deletion- leaving off the ending consonant or consonants of a word, like knife > ni–30% (meaning this was probably clinically significant very recently, and she’s just now learning to put sounds on the ends of her words)

Cluster Reduction- simplifying when there are multiple consonants together, like school > dool–100% (wow!)

Gliding- r or l pronounced as w or y–14% (totally insignificant; this is normal up until 5 years)

Vocalization- replacing l or r by a more neutral vowel, like jar > ju–13% (also totally normal)

Fronting (velar & palatal)- replacing sounds that should be made in the back of the mouth with those made at the front of the mouth, like gate > date–80% (this is typical up to 3 years 6 months, but she does it an awful lot)

Stopping- substituting an quick consonant for a harder, longer consonant, like seal > teal or cheese > tee–70%

Prevocalic Voicing- voicing what should be a voiceless consonant, like fish > dis or sheep > deep–25%

Postvocalic Devoicing- devoicing the final voiced consonant (not a very helpful description), like hive > dif–50%

On the forms we had to fill out before she was evaluated, we had to estimate how much of her speech was understood by family and by strangers. We guessed 90% was understood by us; 50% by strangers. But after reading part of the conclusion in the evaluation, I’m not sure that’s true. Holly wrote, “The evaluator noticed that Jacey’s spontaneous speech was very difficult to understand especially when the context was unknown. Many times Jacey’s mother naturally interpreted what Jacey was saying as she played and conversed with the examiner. Although Jacey demonstrates ‘age-appropriate’ phonological processes” (meaning most of the patterns mentioned above are still appropriate up to 3 1/2 or 4 years), “the high percentage on multiple processes” especially, she told us, cluster reduction, fronting, and stopping, “makes her speech unintelligible.”

That’s another jarring moment, much like seeing what PPCD stands for. That’s stated very baldly, “her speech [is] unintelligible.” Thank goodness we’re going to be able to get this fixed!

The rest of the report talks about the results of her language test (above average for sure, but no firm results since she couldn’t reach a ceiling on the test) and that she’s normal physically and socially.

After we went over that report, we finally got to the real ARD meeting. We had to sign a bunch of papers agreeing to enroll her and saying that she qualified for help and I don’t even remember what all. Then, we got to the page out of all the paperwork that we were really interested in: Jacey’s objectives. For now, her goals are, given a visual and verbal cue, to eliminate the use of stopping with 80% accuracy at first the word, then phrase, then sentence level, and to eliminate cluster reduction by producing two consonants in clusters at the word level with 80% accuracy. Once she starts speech, her teacher might modify these goals based on how she takes to the class.

For cluster reduction, I mentioned that we are sometimes able to get her to say “sssss nat” for “snack” as opposed to just “nat,” and Holly said that yes, that’s the problem–they have to teach her how to combine those consonants, not make two separate sounds or leave it off entirely.

A few more papers, and we were done. I told them when preschool and Ladies’ Bible Class is so that hopefully we can work her speech class around those things (please please please). I asked if we should get her hearing tested, and Holly said she’s not showing the problems you’d usually see in someone with hearing problems, but that it’s never a bad idea to test hearing when someone needs speech therapy.

So now we just wait for her speech teacher, Ms. Devine, to call us to schedule her class. She should call in the first week or two of school, depending on when she gets her schedule set for the school kids. Jacey’s been going through some separation anxiety lately, getting clingy and a little whiney if we have to leave her at Bible class or anywhere other than with Mimi and Gramps, so I’m concerned about dropping her off for the first time with a new teacher. I know she’ll be fine, and I know she’ll enjoy the class, and I know it’ll help her… but I’m not looking forward to tearing her away from me until she realizes she likes Ms. Devine and that speech is fun.

Whew. There you go. Our first ARD meeting down, now we just wait to start class! Yay!

Speech therapy, here we come!

After a successful speech evaluation this morning, we have our results: Jacey does qualify for help with speech, and she’s extremely smart.

First of all, we were running a little late (Rylan just moved into his own room at the beginning of this week, so he’s back to waking up twice a night since he’s not used to it yet, so I’m back to being exhausted all day, so in flailing around to hit snooze, I managed to turn the volume on my alarm all the way down. The alarm went off again later, but I didn’t hear it! Rats!), so Jacey was still feeling tired and hurried when we got there. She’s been going through a clingy stage lately, fussing whenever we drop her off at Bible class (why???), so meeting a stranger was a bit scary. She clung to my leg, and was very shy of talking to Ms. Holly for a while.

I hadn’t even had time to feed Rylan before we left home, so I sat down to feed him while Ms. Holly played with Jacey to allow her to get comfortable. Then they went to look at a book, and the testing had begun.

First they did the enunciation test. Ms. Holly used a flip book that stood up on the table to show Jacey simple pictures–duck, house, cage, etc.–and wrote down on a little form if she said parts of the words wrong. There were lots of t’s and d’s at the beginning of words, lots of -’s at the ends, and lots of s’s where there should have been sh’s or ch’s. I had to move from the big table to the preschool-sized table to help Jacey stay comfortable (lots of fun while still breastfeeding Rylan!), and she needed a little prompting to speak up, but she got comfortable pretty quickly. Then she got bored. She’d ask Ms. Holly if she could go play, and when the answer was “Just a few more,” she’d ask me if she could go play. Ms. Holly got out a little play birthday cake that had holes in the top and some little sticks, and Jacey got to put a birthday candle in the cake each time she answered a question, but even that was starting to pale after three cakes full of candles. But, finally, that portion of the test was over, and she got to go take a one-minute break.

At that point, I asked Holly if she could tell anything yet. She said there are definitely some patterns there. In older children, they’re more concerned with substitutions–w for r, for instance–but in younger children it’s patterns. She said she could already tell that Jacey had at least three patterns. There was a lot of stopping–that means saying a shorter t or d for what should be a longer sound–and she compresses clusters, which are multiple consonants that should be combined into one sound, and then there are all the words where she just leaves the last consonant off. Holly said she’d have to look back at her notes to look for any others, but there were three right off the bat.

After Jacey’s minute to play, she came back for the language test. This wasn’t about the way she pronounced the words; it was about the way she understands the language. She would look at a group of pictures and point to the animals among everything else, or point to the triangles, or answer questions like “What do you do with a spoon?” There were some opposites questions (“Ice is cold; fire is what?”), colors, and counting. There were questions designed to test her understanding of gender (looking at a picture of a girl and a boy each holding a cat, Holly would ask, “Where is her cat?”) The only question she got wrong was about the word “most.” Both times, shown three children with different amounts of balloons or candy and asked to point to the one that had the most, Jacey pointed to the one with the middle amount. As the questions got harder, she’d start to say, “I don’t know.” Sometimes, before she could even finish saying “know,” she’d answer. Sometimes she’d ask me for help, and I’d prompt her to answer Ms. Holly.

This language test is a test where you have to determine a “ceiling.” That means there aren’t a set number of questions and you’re looking at a percentage; rather, you just keep going and asking questions of increasing difficulty, and you’re looking for the child to get a certain number wrong. That level is your ceiling. Jacey was done, bored, ready to move on, so Ms. Holly quit at 4 1/2. I asked if that means Jacey’s language level is equivalent to a 4 1/2-year-old’s, and she said she couldn’t really say, since she never reached a ceiling; she couldn’t give me a year and month equivalency. But she could say that Jacey’s language development was far beyond a 3-year-old’s.

And she’s not even three yet.

(Proud mama here.)

So the result, at the end of the hour-ish of testing, is exactly what I thought it was, but it’s reassuring to hear it: Jacey Dae is really smart. She has really strong language skills. She just needs help with speech.

So now we wait for our ARD meeting, our admission meeting, which has to happen before her third birthday. So sometime next week or the week after. Then, the first week of school, we’ll get a call from the speech teacher at our local elementary school, and she’ll set up speech classes for Jacey. Holly said she’ll recommend an hour a week, and that it’s best if that hour can be done all at once, but sometime it’s broken up into two half-hours, depending on the teacher’s schedule. She’ll be in class with other preschoolers, and they’ll play games and do art projects, and the teacher will help them with speech, and as a reward they’ll get to take their turn at the game or glue something on their art project. It sounds like fun, and I know Jacey will love it. Having seen how smart Jacey is, Holly said she’ll really take well to speech therapy, and I don’t doubt it.

And, at some point, she’ll start getting some homework that Kellen and I can help her with, but the speech teacher should teach us how to help first. I mentioned to Holly that I don’t know how many times to correct Jacey before I give up and let her say words however she wants; I mean, how frustrated should I make her? Holly said, “If she could say it right, she would.” At some point, she just learned that speech is different than it is, so they have to teach her, for example, that words have endings. If she hasn’t learned that on her own by this point, good modeling by her parents probably isn’t going to get her there.

That’s something of a relief to hear. I’m not really one to blame myself. If my kid gets sick, I don’t think, “Oh, I shouldn’t have taken her to the zoo in flu season!” I wasn’t fretting that my child, my child couldn’t speak correctly because I taught her how to speak wrong!! That’s just not where my brain goes. But it’s still nice to hear that this is just something that Jacey won’t learn naturally; at least, not anytime soon, and that she needs some help.

Anyway, at the end of the meeting, Jacey got to play a little more, and Ms. Holly loved on Rylan because she has a couple of grown up redheaded sons herself, and Jacey got a Disney Princess sticker, so all in all it was a fabulous morning for her.

And I am so excited for her to start learning how to speak well.

And glad to know my mothering instincts were right all along. Bad speech, great language, really smart. That’s my kid!

Speech

I’ve been saying for months now that I thought Jacey had some issues with her speech. Among all the “She’ll get the hang of it!” and “Kids just learn to speak at different rates,” and “But her vocabulary is so big!” responses, my mother’s intuition told me that she wasn’t speaking like she should.

And, as I found out at her three-year check-up a few weeks ago, I was right. So the process of figuring out what she needs began.

That day, the doctor gave me a list of speech therapists, but she told me to check with the school district first. I contacted Project TYKE, which is a Katy ISD program for kids under the age of three. I wish I would have known about this program sooner! One of my friends had a baby who was, I think, 8 weeks premature, so she found out about Project TYKE. If you live in Katy and have any concerns about your young child, listen up: they actually come to your house or your child’s daycare to help with whatever he or she needs. Awesome, right? But since Jacey is almost three, they can’t help me. Of course! So they referred me to PPCD.

I contacted PPCD and they brought me in last week for an intake appointment. That just means signing a bunch of papers. But when I got there and saw the sign on the door and saw what PPCD stands for, I almost turned around and went right back home. Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities. Disability. That’s a scary label! My daughter just can’t speak very clearly; she doesn’t have a disability! I don’t want anyone to tell her she DOES have a disability or call her a child with a disability. And of course there’s nothing wrong with having a disability, and I would love her just as much if she did have what you conventionally think of as a “disability.” But she doesn’t, so it’s a scary word. But then, of course, she does need help with this speech thing. So I pushed down my gut reaction to that word and went on in.

They had some toys for her to play with while I dealt with all the papers. I had already filled out a form at home about what she can and can’t or will and won’t do (dress herself, show emotion, hurt herself, perform basic motorskills, be understood when she speaks), and then I had to answer questions about what languages she hears and speaks (multiple questions, all with one answer: English), what my concerns were (solely enunciation), and whether we had any cause to worry about her health or development in other areas (dude, I already told you five times, we’re JUST WORRIED ABOUT HER SPEECH). Then I had to get a couple of huge packets about the process to come and the rights of children with disabilities under Texas law. That word again–scary! Finally, they told me someone would call to set up an evaluation, and that the evaluation, the determination over whether she qualified for help, and the first ARD (admission, review, and dismissal) meeting all had to take place before her third birthday, so someone would call soon.

Someone finally called today to set up the evaluation for next Thursday at 8:30 in the morning. Yuck! That’s usually when she’s waking up, and Rylan is still asleep, and now I’ll have to get them both up, dressed, fed, and into Old Katy by then. That’ll be a good morning. Anyway, the speech therapist will play with her, and show her some cards and ask her what they are and write down how she answers things like “house” and “cat” and other easy words, and then she wants to try a standardized language test that doesn’t always work with three-year-olds. We should have an answer that day as to whether or not Jacey qualifies for help.

So there you go. When I start blogging about her evaulation next week, you’ll know what I’m talking about!