My eleven year son has low functioning Autism. He is non-verbal. He attends public school in a special education center. He is recieving only 1/2 hour of speech a week with three other students in his classroom. I have been fighting to get him more speech and to have him get one-on-one speech. Can some one point me in to the right direction of where to find research studies that I can bring to his IEP to support my claim that he is not getting the services he needs or what approach should be used with him?
I'll try the site that you mention. My son was also placed in an Special Ed class and there was never a speech therapist there for him at all. Later the school said that it was never put in his IEP, when there was a meeting. Our son is 5 1/2 now and his speech is very limited. I don't think a special Ed class is good enough for an autistic child. He never really seemed to want to be there. We almost always had to take him to school cause he wakes up later than most kids due to his sleeping disorder. He stays awake usually until midnight. Our son was usually in school 6 hours, 6 hours is probably too long for him to try to be in a Special Ed classroom even though they went outside for a little while like other kids. He was injured at school - they tried to make him sit down to be part of the class, well a teacher pulled him and he broke loose and went into a bookcase. He fell backwards into it and had a cut on the back of his head, and a big bump. It was the second injury within a couple months so we took him out of the school now and will home school him. I'm looking for legal assistance becase I really believe the cause was all the vaccinations he received after his second birthday.
I suggest typing speech therapy into the Healing Thresholds search function. We have summarized some research papers and guidance documents that describe the sort of speech therapy that a child should be getting. I also think that www.speechville.com is a great resource. Good luck!
PWSMom