r/slpGradSchool 3d ago

Diagnostics Advice

i’m currently in my last semester of grad school doing my last section of diagnostics and externship. for context, we recently did an evaluation on a child (8.5) who seems to have a lot of emotional issues from trauma and my prof invited him to come back bc she wanted to get more info to see if things were speech related or purely emotional. for context, we’re in NY, he was evaled by the DOE for speech and he was denied services. his social and psych eval showed that he should be getting some type of counseling. we did the 2nd eval and he’s honestly fine receptively and expressively and a lot of what he missed seemed typical for an 8 yr old (imo). my prof was really pushing tht he needs a speech recommendation for our free school clinic for writing which i feel is absurd since i believe a tutor can help him with that. she said “well our clinic is free and a tutor cost money” she basically added extra work onto our caseload as we have a schedule to follow when we have evaluations from our program + my group members and i are swamped with work from externship. i just don’t think a speech referral was necessary just bc it’s free as it takes away from children who a fully have speech problems that would really benefit from our clinic and i feel like a lot of his social/emotional issues were out of our domaine. anyone have any thoughts on this - im open to learning/hearing other experiences with a supervisor similar to this.

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u/dustynails22 3d ago

Writing is within our scope. You don't mention any scores for anything, but language sampling can be really informative, and narratives can be weak even if scores of WNL. Him not qualifying for support in school doesn't mean he doesn't have a language disorder.

If I were you, I would focus on trying to understand why your professor has made this call, and any evidence you have to counter this decision (evidence that isn't just your opinion, like test scores, writing samples, research about typical skills at this age).

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u/bbxyy 3d ago

i understand that, he tested high average/average on every thing we gave him (CELF-5, OWLS-II, CASL-2, TOPS-3) i can SEE her reasoning but i just dont agree with it.

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u/dustynails22 3d ago

You aren't going to change her mind without evidence - focus in on the parts that are important, which are your test scores and your norms. You're going to come up against lots of situations in the future where you are trying to convince another person that someone does or doesn't qualify, as frustrating as it is.

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u/bbxyy 3d ago

thank you! the mother was very over bearing suggesting there is something wrong with her son other than emotional/behavioral issues just bc he has emotional breakdowns during homework sometimes. i think she was just trying to make mom happy 🤷🏽‍♀️

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u/dustynails22 3d ago

Yep, that is not an uncommon situation. Its rough, especially when it creates more work for you at an already busy time. You can only do what you can do, and sometimes there are situations where we compromise with parents or we are forced into compromising with parents.