ABQ schools failing speech therapy student

As we passed the three-month mark since the beginning of the school year, Nov. 2 marked a different and more discouraging milestone for our family. It’s been three months now that our son has gone without speech therapy services that he is eligible for through his Individual Education Plan on file with the Albuquerque Public School District.

Even though our child is only in kindergarten, we already see how the lack of access has affected schoolwork. For one project, when asked to draw a picture of his favorite place, our child drew a picture of swings and a slide and wrote “I like the part” which is consistent with an assessed inability to form a hard “K” sound properly. On the quarterly assessment, our child was marked down in some areas related to making proper letter sounds.

Per his IEP, our child is to receive an hour of speech therapy a week. Our child is also entitled to all of the time missed so far this school year, as long as we request it. As of tomorrow that will be 13 hours — a figure that grows week by week.

The irony is, last year when our child wasn’t a student in the Albuquerque Public Schools system, they were able to access speech services at an elementary school. But now, staffing levels and caseloads prohibit our child from accessing the extra practice and lessons.

Now, imagine how many other children throughout the Albuquerque

Public School District that are not getting the services they need.

We’ve met with the staff at our elementary school and we know they are doing all they can. We understand that this issue needs to be addressed at a level well above the school. It’s a district issue.

So I ask of the Albuquerque Public School District leadership: How do you plan to address this for our child and all of the children throughout your schools who need of extra support?

Or, short of a solution by the beginning of the second semester, I would like to know to whom at the Albuquerque Public School District I should bill for the private speech therapy we enroll in because the district can’t meet our child’s needs.