Save the Developmentally Delayed Label!

 

The Federal Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) provides the opportunity for community agencies/school systems to diagnose and label a child with a developmental delay if assessments indicate delays in key developmental areas. IDEA allows children to receive this educational label and receive special services up until the age of 9 in hopes that this label will allow educators the opportunitites to provide research-based interventions specifically targeting delays without the need of attaching an incorrect label too early to a child. This also allows school systems to see if focused interventions provide opportunities for children to “catch up” with peers and to try a variety of strategies while allowing hildren to develop and mature before definitive diagnostic tests are conducted. 

 

Unfortunately, The Virginia Board of Eduation wants to cut down the options for children with developmental delays and narrow the state’s use of the category, making a cut off of age 6 for the use of the developmental delay label(instead of age 9). I see this change impacting Virginia’s children with disabilities in two key ways:

1)      Disability assessments are much more accurate with older children. Let’s allow these children more time to receive assistance before we provide a definitive diagnosis. Why is Virginia cutting this off three years early? As an elementary special education teacher, I found many assessments conducted in preschool and early elementary years only shed light on areas of difficulty and did not always provide definitive diagnoses.A lot of disabilities look very similar in early years so it takes time with intervention before making a correct diagnosis. In the end, a lot of childrens’ diagnoses ended up not being the first diagnosis considered in preschool and elementary school. Let’s give these children time to develop. If we assess a child who was just found to have a delay when they started kindergarten at age 5, we are not providing enough time for interventions to work to assess whether the child has a delay or a disability. 

2)      If we stop the DD label at age 6, what happens to those preschoolers and kindergarteners who have been behind since they were an infant or toddler and are making good progress? Stopping the DD label at age six may mean, that while the children are still behind they will stop receiving assistance at age six because they are improving with intervention and are not “behind enough” to qualify for the more intensive disabilities such as intellectual disability, learning disability, emotional disturbance, autism, etc. We may actually create a scenario where kids that were doing better, because they actually have developmental delays and not true disabilities become at-risk kids when dropped from services at age 6 due to the lack of services. Why drop services at what research has indicated as one of the most crucial formative periods in a child’s development? We’re dropping services right at the time a child is learning to read- a major predictor of the success a child will have in later school years and as an adult! I see the potential for children (previously labeled developmentally delayed) who may have responded well to intervention services until age 6 being dropped from assistance because they do not fit within our typical special education labels, which are not foolproof and contain measures of error. Does Virginia really want to set up a situation where these children who were catching up end up NOT receiving help until issues become severe? Virginia, do we want at-risk children sitting in typical classrooms not receiving services during formative years until they develop a label such as Emotionally Disturbed because they now develop behavior difficulties after sitting for years in a classroom that is too difficult for them where they keep falling further and further behind without help? This may be an extreme example, but I do see the possibility that without the Developmentally Delayed Label Option until age 9, there being a group of children who now need more assistance(and requiring more special education funding) because we let their delays sit for years while they became worse and “better fit” our special education categories. 

 

Virginians, you have until 5/12/09 to post comments on the Virginia Board of Education proposed changes. There is still time to tell them we want to keep the Developmentally Delayed  label until age 9 for our children! Go to: http://www.townhall.state.va.us/L/comments.cfm?stageid=4828 and post a comment on this issue. 

In addition, it is very easy to contact Governor Kaine via his online webform at    http://www.governor.virginia.gov/AboutTheGovernor/contactGovernor.cfm. Let our state representatives know that we want to give children more time to develop under the Developmentally Delayed Label!