Concerned my school district is not providing the appropriate SpEd services to support mild to mod
To start, my 5 yr old daughter will be going to gen ed K with 1 hr a day of SAI - Specialized Assisted Instruction (pushed in) in the fall. She has an IEP, for speech delay, and orthopedic impairment (L wrist doesn’t supinate past 45o). She also has gross developmental delay diagnosis since about 16 months, LLD (leg length discrepancy), and autism (CARS 2) diagnosis at 3.75 yrs. She’s been going to OT & PT since about 18 months, ST since 2 yrs old through Regional and insurance. She did public Pre-school as collaborative ed, and Trans-K as collaborative ed, each with 3 hrs a day of SAI. The special program they had lost funding so they are no longer offering the collaborative ed program. Therefore, she is getting placed in a gen ed class. Her SpEd teacher in TK said she believes my daughter should be able to access the gen ed curriculum in K so they lowered her SAI from 3 hrs/dy to 1 hr/dy and I signed the IEP! But there is no data to support this since they were not able to assess her. She is considered nonverbal, even though she does talk but she is unintelligible to general public most of the time. She has access to AAC, but she prefers to talk. They basically said that she doesn’t know (or they can’t assess) her colors, shapes, can’t identify uppercase vs lower case and doesn’t know her numbers. And I totally agree. I’ve asked my daughter as well many times and she doesn’t say anything or always says red, though lately she says yellow too. After talking to some of the other moms with IEPs for their kids, they are concerned that the school district is NOT providing the appropriate sped options for mild to mod kids. I know the district is required to provide services to access the gen ed curr in California. But other than requesting a 30 day assessment after school starts I don’t know what else I can do to change her IEP, or maybe even change it back to 3 hrs/dy if that’s what she needs. She also gets OT, PT, and ST at school. And she’s been getting ABA 20 hrs/week for roughly 7 months out of this last year, which has helped and is helping, though she doesn’t have any ‘behavior issues’, it mostly helps with getting her to speak and say the appropriate thing, bc she mimics a lot. It may be that we end up taking K twice, but I’m wondering what more the school can be doing vs what I can be doing to help her be kindergarten ready. I don’t know what is typical, but she seems really far behind. I do want her in general ed, though I preferred the collaborative ed when it was available. What are some things I should be looking for that shows that she is not accessing the gen ed curriculum? What services can I request (Inclusion or Integration)? What works well for her case? We are in Southern California, in Orange County. I prefer not to say the city. I’m thinking of getting her a tutor who specializes in autistic kids, is it too early? With all the therapies, it’s a challenge to fit extra curricular activities but we do it somehow. All this helps, but I’m concerned they are not going to support her once school starts.