Today for What’s Up Wednesday is a question that was sent in asking about the policy for making up missed speech minutes.
This is a situation I am sure we have all been in at some point. You have IEP meetings, evaluations, screenings, student emergencies, illnesses, etc. All of these events have one thing in common, you don’t get to see your students. So what is the deal with the minutes you miss?
ASHA released a statement a while ago that, in a nutshell, states that districts shouldn’t have a direct policy regarding missed sessions but that the IEP team should determine if the time missed time is significant enough to warrant regression and should determine, as a team, how services should be made up. Now this statement applies to more chronic and extreme student absences. As for the occasional days missed here and there, we can use this statement to understand that we should always try to make up missed sessions when we can, since IEP minutes are legal minutes that we must do our best to meet.
Here are some ways you can try to make up the occasional missed session:
- Try and fit the student into another group to make up the extra time
- Ask the teacher if the student can be pulled for a few minutes from a non-academic time of the day ( like read-a-loud)
- If they are artic students, try the 5-Minute Therapy Model to make up the miss time
Now I know these won’t always work and there will be other missed sessions, so try your best to fit those minutes in where you can and don’t freak out if you can’t make it work a few times.
*You can read the ASHA statement HERE.
