American Special Ed System (part 3)

The special education professional perspective

Decreased funding and an increased number of children in special education have naturally impacted the workload of therapists and teachers. Typically, a speech therapist sees fifty to sixty children multiple times per week. The therapist spends six school hours per day providing direct therapy services, and two school hours documenting, billing, writing IEPs, scheduling meetings, and completing other tasks. Almost all therapists I know write their assessment reports at home on their own time. Often therapy sessions are back-to-back (sometimes without even a bathroom break). This type of crazy schedule and pressure naturally results in compromised therapy over time. Compromised therapy is still within legal limits. I often feel that we can stretch, bend, or even dilute the laws as long as we know how to frame legal and politically correct sentences. In other words, ethics are defined by the limits of law. It should not be this way.

Many school districts have an unsaid policy on limiting services to two times a week group session maximum irrespective of child's need. Two times a week group therapy is clearly not enough if your child has moderate to severe communication disorder but the school will convinces you otherwise and gives you a false hope that everything is going to be alright. You can fight for more services by hiring an advocate but it is unbelievably tiresome, time consuming, distracting and expensive. My opinion is, use that energy, time and money on finding help outside the school system.

Most professionals who work with children with special needs choose this profession because of their service mindset. They really want to serve the children in the most effective way possible. They get their job satisfaction by doing what they love to do. But often professionals cannot make both school and parent happy while doing complete justice to the child.

Is this a sustainable system?

Ultimately everything boils down to economics. While this country has a national deficit of multi-trillions of dollars, and individual states are going through huge budget crises one by one, can we afford these expensive services? Who will pay for them? Can this system deliver what it promises? Does it have more than it can chew? I am not a financial expert, but my common sense says this is neither a sustainable system nor a complete solution. Government, policy makers, parents, policy implementers, school districts, and each of us voters have played some or other role in making the system the way it is. Fixing this mess will take decades. Unfortunately, by that time your kid will be an adult. Therefore, instead of focusing on fixing the system, let us try to work with our children within it. My goal is to help you use the system more efficiently and effectively for the benefit of your child.

Take Away

The existing system will help you make your child independent or functional, it will not do it for you. In other words, it’s more about our responsibilities than our rights.