Self - Advocate IEP

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loml

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Harpers Corner

It is mind-blowing how much difference half a year makes in regards to the development and growth of a child. Harper is four and a half years old and she has made great strides since the last edition of Harper’s Corner. She is busy with her summertime schedule at the beach, with summer schooling, and has started to cue new words including “shell,” “ocean,” and “wave”!

We had Harper’s IEP meeting this past March. The IEP team included her teacher, her occupational, physical and speech therapists, and my wife and me. Maisie and I approached this meeting expecting to encounter resistanceto our request that Cued Speech be implemented in her speech therapy sessions. Each team member spoke and recounted their goals from the last IEP and how Harper had performed.

Then they discussed their future goals and objectives to be met. The speech therapist spoke last and summarized about how Harper was beginning to
formulate more complex sentences, but had difficulty making some speech sounds.

I made it known that Maisie and I wanted Harper to start using Cued Speech in her speech sessions. The speech therapist probably had anticipated this, and she stated almost immediately that she was in agreement and that she wanted to cue with Harper.

However we were shocked when the therapist stated that Harper had already started cueing in previous sessions! Whenever Harper had difficulty repeating a sound, she would mimic a cue herself and then proceed to make the sound. Harper had in effect been her own advocate for cueing and had convinced the therapist that she was able to formulate the sounds if she cued them. Talk about self-implementation!

We barely did anything and, as a result of our little advocate, Cued Speech is a formal part of her IEP. I feel we were extremely fortunate; however, I am dismayed by the experiences of other families across the country who are having trouble with their own IEP meetings. As an advocate for the NCSA, I have learned about several families in which the parents were having difficulty convincing the schools to implement Cued Speech into their child’s IEP. Sometimes special education teams are reticent to recognize, much less implement, Cued Speech. These families approached the NCSA and depending on the situation, whether it was school politics, budgetary, or both, we could assist them by having experienced parents and board members help out. In other cases, we simply provided support and written documentation, which helped attain satisfactory results.

The bottom line is this: Cued Speech is a protected, mind you, federally protected, mode of communication. No public school district can reasonably
deny Cued Speech to any child who has an established need under the guidelines of IDEA. The NCSA can be a wonderful resource of support and we will do our best to provide advocacy should you have a need to educate an IEP team on why this system is so crucial to your child’s access to spoken language and literacy.
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http://www.cuedspeech.org/PDF/OnCueSummer09.pdf
 
Cued speech have it advantages in the classroom in a school setting . It just is not a good way to communicate as sign language is expressive.

And I had this discussion with Dr Merrill decades ago...
 
SouthFella said:
Cued speech have it advantages in the classroom in a school setting . It just is not a good way to communicate as sign language is expressive.

And I had this discussion with Dr Merrill decades ago...
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That was what Jillio and I have been trying to say but nobody believes us. :roll:

CS is good as a teaching tool.
 
Cued speech have it advantages in the classroom in a school setting . It just is not a good way to communicate as sign language is expressive.
Click to expand...
Exactly. It's a really good tool......It's basicly visual hooked on phonics..But it's not a good primary communication method since very few people (even in the deaf community) use it. And yes.....a small number of people sign.....but that's FAR MORE then the number of people who cue.
 
SouthFella said:
Cued speech have it advantages in the classroom in a school setting . It just is not a good way to communicate as sign language is expressive.

And I had this discussion with Dr Merrill decades ago...
Click to expand...

SF: If you wish to debate your statement "Cued speech has its advantages in the classroom setting", start a new topic please.

Thanks.
 
deafdyke said:
Exactly. It's a really good tool......It's basicly visual hooked on phonics..But it's not a good primary communication method since very few people (even in the deaf community) use it. And yes.....a small number of people sign.....but that's FAR MORE then the number of people who cue.
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deafdyke - If you wish to debate/defend/discuss your opinion start a new topic please.

Thanks.
 
before this goes off track.....

The intent of this article is not to resurrect the "dead horse" of opinions.

This is the choice that this family has made, with obvious success. Please be courteous and respect their choice.
 
SouthFella said:
Cued speech have it advantages in the classroom in a school setting . It just is not a good way to communicate as sign language is expressive.

And I had this discussion with Dr Merrill decades ago...
Click to expand...

loml said:
SF: If you wish to debate your statement "Cued speech has its advantages in the classroom setting", start a new topic please.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

If I read this correctly, SouthFella wasn't debating. He said it does have it's advantages in the classroom. It is in line with your original post, especially since your last quote says "Cued Speech is a protected, mind you, federally protected, mode of communication. No public school district can reasonably
deny Cued Speech to any child who has an established need under the guidelines of IDEA." Why start a new thread when we're already talking about a school setting?
 
LOML I am not trying to engage you in a debate... I was just responding to your post...

Nor do I beat a " dead horse " One make a statement , another can respond to it ...

Call " Free Speech" ... Does Canada have Free Speech ? I need to check on that one..

Smile
 
The shoe doesn't fit......

AlleyCat said:
If I read this correctly, SouthFella wasn't debating. He said it does have it's advantages in the classroom. It is in line with your original post, especially since your last quote says "Cued Speech is a protected, mind you, federally protected, mode of communication. No public school district can reasonably deny Cued Speech to any child who has an established need under the guidelines of IDEA." Why start a new thread when we're already talking about a school setting?
Click to expand...

The intention of the post was to bring awareness, to this family’s successful experience advocating for CS as a mode of communication, documented in the IEP, under the guidelines of IDEA.

My suggestion to start another topic was simply providing an different avenue for the other posters.
 
I dont understand Cued Speech at all. I was watchin a video of it on youtube and to me it looks like a load of rubbish
 
DeafLissa90 said:
I dont understand Cued Speech at all. I was watchin a video of it on youtube and to me it looks like a load of rubbish
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It is only rubbish to those that are unable to pick up every single available phonics out there. You really start seeing it fall apart when people don't know how the phonetics of a word is laid out.

Great for those that have a hard time processing auditory information and can still hear or are unable to express themselves verbally, but for deaf people? That is where I am iffy on because they are not going to be carrying an IPA dictionary around with them all their life.

Great in classroom only if the child knows how it works and if deaf pupils have access to the written language, however out in the real world? That is when you start seeing cued speech take on a direction that is no longer "pure cued speech" and eventually those users start incorporating sign languages in their life while they gradually drop cued speech.

So it is not really rubbish if you can understand it, however it have its pitfalls.
 
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