Ryan - The beginning

Ryan has an older brother that is 19 months older than him and was diagnosed with a speech delay of 10 months when he was 2.5. At 3 years old he was diagnosed with severe speech delay through our school system so I knew what to look for with Ryan. When our wonderful EI coordinator (Ms. T) came each week she got to see Ryan as well. I will post in detail about Kyle in a later post.

When Ryan was 2.5 I decided to go ahead and call EI. Ms. T said that I probably wouldn't need her but said to call her anyway if I wanted to. She said that Ryan was so far advanced than Kyle was that she wasn't too concerned about him. I decided to call since we had such a great experience with Kyle in the school system and didn't have anything to lose. EI came with a coordinator, and SLP and an OT to do the initial EI evaluation. At 28 months his scores were as follows:

Cognitive - 19 months
Expressive - 17 months
Receptive - 24 months
Motor - 24 months
Social/Emotional - 21 months
Adaptive - 21 months (due to not being 100% potty trained)

Eligible for services under the DSM - speech impairment. No OT services were required and the OT said that she was excited to see such a great kid because she usually sees much more impaired children. He started EI services the next week every week for 8 months and progressed rapidly. Moreso than Kyle did at the same age.

A month before Ryan was to turn 3 we went over the transition from EI to the Public School District. I had been through all of this before so there wasn't much information to be had. I went the week before the exit evaluation to the school to go over EVERYTHING that was going to be done. It took 45 minutes because they want to be thorough and everything and get my signature, etc. As I have mentioned before, Ms. T said that they had a new psychologist and she was diagnosing 99% of the children exciting EI with some sort of an ASD but I didn't have to worry. We were actually worried that he wouldn't be far enough behind to even qualify so I didn't have to worry. Boy, was I wrong.

Ms. T was suppose to be at the evaluation. I was early, she was late. When I asked where Ms. T was, they said she had to cancel and they started without her. That was a lie. She got the time mixed up and never called them to tell them she was not coming. I thought it was strange too because I thought she would of called me. The testing was over before she walked in the door and she was only 30 minutes late. That tells you something, doesn't it. She could see from the look on my face that I was not happy.

After exactly 23 minutes the psychologist in her shrink ways told me that Ryan had PDD-NOS which is mild autism. I laughed. I said "how in the world can you diagnose something like that in this amount of time?" Oddly, she didn't answer me. They looked at me like I had 2 heads. Here comes Ms. T. I had my stuff already and was walking out the door and she followed me outside. She was royaly pissed and went back in there and argued with all of them. I am afraid that she lost a friend out of this situation too which I am sorry for. She had my back and I will forever be grateful to her. She even came to the first ARD meeting to tell the ARD committee that she didn't agree with the way the assesment was handled.

When I told Ms. T that they said they used the EI information that was on file, she said there was no way that there was anything in Ryan's file that suggested anything to that nature and she was really upset.

I will post his evaluation report in the next post. This is probably getting a bit long as it is.

I didn't even know about the NLT yahoo group during all this. It wasn't until I got home from that horrible evaluation that I started surfing the net. I found lots of great sites and I even browsed the PDD-NOS/autism message boards before joining NLT yahoo group. I knew something was fishy about this evaluation before even knowing it was going on in other parts of the world.