What Will Go Wrong

Money Problems

Your Heath Insurance Provider will reject your claims for speech and occupational therapy. Most health insurance plans contain language which, at first glance, appears to indicate that speech and occupational therapy services are covered expenses. In reality, the coverage only applies if the services are needed for rehabilitation after an injury or stroke. There is usually no coverage for services intended to address the symptoms of a disability. Often you will see a 60 day limit placed on the coverage, if it even exists. The words "developmental delay," if they appear on any document submitted to an insurance provider, will almost always cause the claim to be immediately rejected.

If you are clever at playing the managed health care game, you can sometimes get your insurance company to pay for evaluations. You should not, however, expect them to pay for the actual services. In theory, the responsibility for the cost of speech and occupational therapy falls on your local school district, since without these therapies your child would be prevented from obtaining a free, appropriate, public education (FAPE), but you will need to learn how to be a strong advocate for your child in order to obtain services which adequately address your child's needs.

Your school district will ignore you. The administration of your local school district is made up of people who have no personal stake in your child's progress. It is unreasonable to expect them to provide the services to which you are legally entitled because they care about your child. Caring is your job. Their job is to insure that the district complies with both the state special education law and IDEA. A good understanding of both laws will give you the tools you need to overcome almost any difficulty you encounter with your school district.

More often than not, representatives of your school district will fail to return your calls, offer you inadequate services on the grounds that "this is all we have available," choose evaluation tools which generate results compatible with the services they can most easily provide (instead of creating an accurate picture of your child's needs), and, in general, do as little as possible. You will pay for this treatment with your tax dollars.

Philosophical Differences

Your school district will attempt to place your child in a special education classroom where behavior modification is the main focus of the program. Almost all public school systems believe that ABA is the correct approach to use when educating a developmentally disabled child. Why shouldn't they? ABA can probably produce behavioral changes in autistic children which reflect the goals of the public education system better than any other intervention method. Unfortunately, these goals have very little in common with ours. As cynical as it may sound, our personal belief is that public schools in general are more concerned with compliance than with learning. They prefer a child who can sit quietly in his or her chair to one who presents challenges, regardless of his or her potential for achievement. Of course there are exceptions, but we don't count on them. Also, the "scientific research" studies which "proved" ABA was producing "good" outcomes measured skills which were most relevant to educational settings, such as restrictiveness of school placement, IQ and adaptive behavior, when deciding which children had good outcomes. Skills necessary for our goals, such as flexibility, empathy and the capacity for abstract thinking, were not considered at all. One of these studies bases its claim that ABA is effective on the outcomes of only nine children. Keep this in mind when someone tells you that ABA is scientifically proven to be effective.

Preschool children are especially vulnerable to being placed in overly restrictive environments which, in our opinion, do more harm to them than good. See our page on Inclusion for more information as well as Advocate in Training.

Our way of overcoming this problem was to convince our school district to place Katie in a Montessori school (and pay for it), where individual differences are expected, accepted and even welcomed. We were able to obtain such a placement for Katie on the grounds that it represented a less restrictive environment than a regular public school Kindergarten, where she would have been excluded from her non-disabled peers for at least part of every day. We also contended that the full day sessions offered by the Montessori school would increase Katie's chances of attaining her IEP goals by providing her with more opportunities to develop social skills. The public Kindergarten did not offer a full day session. Some parents believe that they cannot obtain services from their local school district unless their child actually attends the public school. This is often untrue.

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