School Speech Therapy and Special Education Overidentification

American school speech-language pathologists continue to make placement recommendations for a large percentage of all special education children, second only to Specific Learning Disability.  The number has been growing, and many of the children placed and retained are incorrectly identified.  Many are non-disabled minority children.  An effect never considered is how speech and language designation reduces [...]

School SLPs and Over-identification

The recent history of American special education is that too many children have been placed. Here are assorted reasons mentioned in policy debates.  SLPs and special eduction teachers can begin to address issues of eligibility placement and retention with a better appeciation of the powerful factors pushing on them to over-subscribe children who should not [...]

Prevention: SLPs Must Screen Out Non-Disabled Pupils

During college SLPs learn about cultural and linguistic differences.  Yet SLPs are still mis-placing non-disabled children.   The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has published a school position statement on the Role of Speech-Language Pathologists: “Providing Culturally Competent Services.  With the ever-increasing diversity in the schools, SLPs make important contributions to ensure that all students receive quality, culturally competent [...]

SLP Perspective on Overidentification

Why are there so many children in special education? Before 1950 special needs children were underrepresented in schools. IDEA legislation pressured teachers into taking and “mainstreaming” greater numbers of handicapped pupils. Federal financial incentives helped inflate enrollments. Numbers grew faster than predicted by underlying social and medical disability. Unknown is the extent to which local [...]

Speech Pathology Prevention in Schools

Prevention is a long-held professional goal of speech and language pathology.  In schools, the best opportunity is to reduce the number of pupils needlessly placed and retained in special education.  Even though special education personnel, including SLPs, complain about having big caseloads, most do not take responsibility for aggressively screening out non-disabled minority children.

SLP Caseload Eligibility

As a part of Strategic Eligibility Management (SEM), the alert SLP must start off whittling away at his or her individual caseload to reduce size and misidentifications in an ethical manner. Beyond this, the SLP is interdependent with other SLPs who might be creating placement “leaks” in the special education system. Caseloads are passed on from preschool to high school, [...]

SLPs, RTI and Over-identification

Speech Pathology Group advocates for school collaboration to reduce time demands on SLPs. Collaboration takes place through Response To Intervention programs and can prevent SLI over-identification: “The purpose of implementing a response to intervention (RTI) program is to not only reduce the number of special education referrals and evaluations, but to also prevent inappropriate placement [...]

Monitoring Misidentification for SLPs

SLPs want to manage special education eligibility correctly and in this way ethically keep caseload size and workload under control. IDEA 2004 regulations provides the legal basis to reduce overidentification and disproportionality in all private and public U. S. schools. idea.ed.gov (Legacy 2007) provides a summary of what state and local school districts “must” do [...]

SLI Definition for Eligibility

IDEA 2004 says SLPs are supposed to ensure at-risk children are properly placed in special education. “Proper” involves accurately following statutory criteria for “speech and language impairment” (SLI). Otherwise, there can be under-, over- and misidentification of SLI students and this works against their FAPE rights. Here is an example of how inconsistency can come into play. [...]

4. SLP Misidentification

We wonder who puts the so many children in special education? Who are the key decision-makers? SLPs play a key role. IDEA 2004 regulations address the thorny problem of decisions to place learning disabled children, a category that by all sources has run wild over the last 35 years. “The determination of whether a child [...]