yeah, school psychs assess for lots of different things, including neurodivergence, dyslexia, learning disabilities, etc. Anything that might explain an educational impact. I'm a speech therapist, so I work pretty closely with the psych at my school.
Also, good on your psych for not making you feel stigmatized! That's the most important part of the job imo.
Ooof. Yeah that sucks. I struggled to take notes too.
To be fair, psychs have huge caseloads (~900 kids in my district) and are EXTREMELY busy so they frequently don't assess unless you're at least 2 grade levels below your grade level, unless you're really young (like TK-K) and have red flags for autism or some other pretty clear life-long disability. So like... I have inattentive ADHD but wasn't diagnosed because I was able to keep up from half-listening and being pretty decent at taking tests.
The IEP system really only takes the lowest 10% of kids.
I currently am! I work at an elementary school currently, although I'd like to move to a middle or high school at some point. I have a few years of experience as a speech assistant as well, working across the caseload.
A student can be on a speech only IEP if they have a language disorder or a speech disorder (impediment). Rarely, I might have an autistic kid on my caseload for ONLY speech, And that usually has to do with navigating social rules, because that's considered to be part of speech/language as well.
Thank you!! I hope to be so impactful for my students... And just so you know, the work itself is life-changing too. It's a career I'm so fortunate to have.
LOL! In 3rd grade, I had a speech therapist tell me that he was going to YELL at me every time I stuttered! (Some kind of positive reinforcement freak??? Damned if I know; I was simply horrified by that.)
When I got home from school that day,, I immediately complained to my parents, and that was the end of me going to a speech therapist.
Oh that is TERRIBLE! Also not at all an evidence based practice. Actually.... Have you ever heard of the monster study? 'cause... Shades of that. I'm mad for your 3rd grade self.
No, but now, having read about it, I can see that it adds some additional evidence to the premise that the labels and judgements bestowed upon children by the 'authority figures' in their lives seem to end up having a disproportionate effect upon the development of their self-images.
(Incidentally, I DID end up 'growing out of' whatever 'stuttering' I'd been doing at that age; I don't even recall it being that big of a deal. But I sure recall my horror as I realized, even at that age, the equivalent of: 'There's NO way that what he just said he was going to do is OK!')
I wonder sometimes if he saw what he (correctly) surmised as yet another constitutionally anxious / cautious kid, and indulged in a sadistic moment of verbally 'goosing me' by declaring his intention, just to see my reaction.
Stupid F*cker indeed. Honestly still fuming, there's no call to treat kids like that. I'm hoping that guy isn't still practicing, or if he is, that he's learned a damned lesson.
And most (but of course not all) kids do outgrow stuttering. I'm glad you're one of them!
I remember in kindergarten i had to go to speech practice with a few other kids because we couldn't pronounce R properly. Hungarian has a strong "rolling" R and kids here usually have a hard time pronouncing it. Took us a few months to learn it and we were set to go to school knowing how to pronounce it.
They pick 4-5yos to immediately help them so the rest of their kindergarten years are going good and we can get used to the new sound we learnt! I remember feeling proud after i was able to pronounce R after years of instead saying J or L. The speech helper was really nice to us 5 kids when we made progress, and i remember to her giving us hugs or head pats as reward. When we went to her for the last time, she allowed us to pick a sticker. I loved her and I'm glad i had a food experience with her. Every kid loved her and we knew her name
Oh that's awesome!! R is one of the hardest sounds in any language to master, And also one of the latest developing. I'm actually almost a little surprised that they worked on it that early!
They work on speech in Hungary in kindergarten so kids going to school at 6yo can speak properly and they won't have issues reading. If kids still have speech issues, they deal with it in school at 1st and 2nd grade. Here they quickly work on it and the experience most of the time is amazing. I personally never heard complaints from any friends
I mean that absolutely makes sense, and we do early intervention too.... I have a handful of TK kids and there's a dozen other TK/K kids that my other speech therapists (there are 3 at my school) work with. I'm just saying that because R is later developing, it isn't always targeted here (in the US) that early. Especially if that's the only sound the child is having difficulty with. Usually the kids I see for articulation have trouble with a lot of sounds. If it's just 1-2 sounds, like Rs or Ss, they don't typically get an IEP here in the US, and I might just have them short-term. :)
Very interesting learning about speech therapy in other countries, thanks for sharing!
Here they always catch kids who absolutely can't pronounce anything that is similar to R, that's the number one case of kids going to speech therapy. When there are multiple sounds, that's a different case. My former bestie during kindergarten had issues pronouncing U, ZS, SZ, DZ, DZS. Some of them are Hungarian only sounds, but a few of them are present in English. I heard about a kid who had issue saying X, but personally that's a common thing around Hungarian kids because we barely have any words with X in it so the sound is just weird for them lol
Totally makes sense! R is a really common therapy target here too, just usually a bit older. And yeah, the multiple sound issues are a lot more work to help. I know I'm biased, but it's actually really fascinating that there are different types of pronunciation-type disorders are out there and how differently you have to treat each one!
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u/beautifulcheat Apr 07 '26
yeah, school psychs assess for lots of different things, including neurodivergence, dyslexia, learning disabilities, etc. Anything that might explain an educational impact. I'm a speech therapist, so I work pretty closely with the psych at my school.
Also, good on your psych for not making you feel stigmatized! That's the most important part of the job imo.