where should ABA be concentrated?

[zumbaleena]

I have a HFA verbal 3 yr old and I run a strong ABA VB program - home based 15 hours and school based - 6 hours a week...so total = 21 hours. It benefits dd very well. We just got a proposed statement - 12 hours a week LSA @8.30 gbp per hour. I need your help and opinion in deciding what should be the best scenario -

1. School suggests they employ a simple TA (dinner lady) from this funding to help in school work. It frees up dd's keyworker to focus more on dd and we can top her up to attend dd's ABA workshops and to work in a more aba way with her.

1. My ABA consultant suggested we hire a simpler ABA tutor with some nursery experience and we top her up so dd can get some quality ABA in school.

1. I am thinking (not sure) that we should go back to the SEN panel asking for a more qualified TA (level 2 - 11 gbp per hour; link being we made a strong case between dd's progress and her 1:1 aba tutor in school).

If we got the 11 gbp TA money, I can be assured of a robust ABA program in school and I can look into reducing the home sessions otherwise we will forever have to run the home program and we will be dependant on dd being able to generalise in school with a not so experienced tutor and God knows what...she will do with the dinner lady. It is also financially easy for us to top up and reduce the sessions at home.

I could go to tribunal asking for full ABA program but that is a really really long fight and I will go nuts spending on the home and school program by then.

Pls advise what you think as being best.

I doubt it's worth the aggro fighting for 12 hours per week at £8.30 rather than 12 hours at £11. The quality of helper is unlikely to be that different, and the battle is too big for a 'win' of £30/ week term time only.

If the school are on-side, and your tutors are flexible, might one be persuaded to apply for the school job at the low pay rate? You then don't have to shell out for yet more training, and could then up the rate for the 'home' hours so overall earnings stay the same. .

Also it would mean they track her in-school progress properly, which means evidence if needed for any big ABA tribunal later.

What MD said.

It won't be worth rocking the boat or flagging yourself up to the LA with this. Put all your effort into persuading school to have one of your ABA tutors. Once established and all happy THEN seek funds.

Star...I did not understand what u meant by persuading the school to have one of our tutors and then seeking funds. School is already co operative, our tutors go in 6 hrs a week and on that basis we applied for funding and got the statement

So that tutor needs to be directly employed by school instead, as your dd's LA-funded, poorly paid, 12 hours LSA. Taking direction from the class teacher rather than from you (with you and teacher meeting regularly to jointly decide on suitable in-school targets).

The tutor can then do a few extremely highly paid hours with you in the home to make the overall pay packet work out right "appropriately reward" the advanced task of generalising the school targets into life outside academia.

He/she can subtly train up the key worker too so they can use ABA skills with the LSA hovering, and during the hours when there isn't funded 1-1.

I think by "seek funds" star means funds for intensive early intervention (rather than funding for a dinner lady doing 12h of in-class babysitting)

yeah cool! got it...the school will hopefully agree to employ my tutor...I will top her up. but that means accepting the statement and then appealing it...on what grounds...I already accepted it. sorry...i do come across as total DUH

The thing is that schools (state schools anyway) are very unlikely to employ one of your tutors - they prefer to do their own recruiting from their known pool, and employing one of your tutors gives you much more control over the type of support your dd gets, which is the thing that makes schools really twitchy.

Sadly, ABA can cause conflict as the approach is not always consistent with the approach used in ms schools - whose approach is often more babysitting/firefighting to cause minimum disruption to the teacher/rest of class, rather than doing what is necessary to ensure the ASD child benefits.

Whatever you decide though, imo the only way you can truly ensure that your dd has ABA support in class is through your statement. The school may say all the right things now but when it comes to it, if it's not in the statement, they can change their mind whenever they want. (This happened to us.)

I know the tribunal thing is really daunting, but if I was you I would definitely reject the proposed statement. 12 hours is rubbish, for a start. You need many more hours than that, and every bit of support needs to be specified and quantified.

What we have now (I think I've probably told you this before) is a TA who was recruited by school, but works to our ABA targets - takes data at school, comes to team meetings, has regular training, and one day a week our actual tutor goes into school so the TA learns on the job from her as well. But we had to fight to ensure this was in our statement, as if it wasn't the school would have insisted on having nothing to do with ABA (despite them promising to do so at the beginning).