Two sentences, usually a few weeks apart. The teacher says, "We'll refer him for a speech evaluation." Then the report comes back and says your child does not qualify — and a friend says, "Just go private, the school never qualifies anyone."
Both of those sentences are missing the same thing. School speech therapy and private speech therapy are not two grades of the same product. They are answers to two different questions, and only one of those questions is clinical.
Private therapy asks: does this child have a communication disorder worth treating? School services ask something much narrower, written into federal law: does this child have a disability that adversely affects educational performance, such that specially designed instruction is required to give them a free appropriate public education?
A child can clearly fail the second test and clearly pass the first. That gap is not a scandal and it is not a school SLP cutting corners. It is the law working as designed — and understanding it is the difference between walking out of an eligibility meeting confused and walking out with a plan.
If your child is under three, this is not yet your question; the system that applies is the state early intervention program, and our guide to speech therapy vs. early intervention covers how ECI eligibility works and what happens at the third birthday. This page picks up where that one ends.
School Eligibility Is a Three-Part Test, and Only the First Part Is Clinical
ASHA's guidance on eligibility for school-based speech-language services frames the determination as three questions asked in order:
- "Is there a disability?"
- "If so, is there an adverse effect on educational performance resulting from the disability?"
- Are "specially designed instruction and/or related services and supports needed to help the student make progress"?
Only question one is the question a private clinician asks. Questions two and three are statutory gates.
The gate language comes straight from the regulation. Under 34 CFR 300.8(c)(11), a "speech or language impairment means a communication disorder, such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment, that adversely affects a child's educational performance." Everything turns on that final clause. The disorder is necessary but not sufficient.
There is a second, subtler gate that catches families off guard. The same regulation says that if a child has one of the listed disabilities "but only needs a related service and not special education, the child is not a child with a disability under this part." Speech therapy is listed as a related service — so on a plain reading, a child who needs only speech therapy would be shut out entirely.
What rescues that is a cross-reference. 34 CFR 300.39(a)(2)(i) counts "speech-language pathology services, or any other related service, if the service is considered special education rather than a related service under State standards" as special education in its own right. Most states, including Texas, treat it that way, which is why speech-only IEPs exist at all. It is worth knowing that this is a state-standards question rather than a federal guarantee.
"His Grades Are Fine" Is Not a Lawful Reason to Deny Services
If you take one thing from this page into a meeting, take this.
The adverse-effect prong is the one districts lean on, and it is also the one most often applied too narrowly. ASHA's chronology of U.S. Department of Education policy letters — the 1980 letter and the 2007 letter that reaffirmed it — is unusually direct on the point. ASHA writes that "it is emphasized in each letter that educational performance is not limited to academic performance," and, flatly, that "a student with a disability cannot be denied service even if there are no concomitant academic problems."
Educational performance includes functional and social communication, classroom participation, intelligibility to peers and adults, and performance in nonacademic and extracurricular settings. A fourth grader with a severe lisp who reads at grade level is not automatically ineligible. ASHA also notes that the effect "must be considered on a case-by-case basis to meet the individual needs of each student" — not by a cutoff score.
So if the stated reason for a denial is good grades and nothing else, that reason does not match federal guidance. You are entitled to the determination in writing, along with your procedural safeguards notice, and you are entitled to ask the team which specific areas of educational performance they considered besides academics.
None of that means every denial is wrong. Plenty are correct. It means a denial should rest on a reasoned, documented look at more than a report card, and you can ask for exactly that without being adversarial about it.
How to Request an Evaluation in Texas, and the Clock It Starts
Do not ask verbally at a conference and hope. Put the request in writing, date it, keep a copy, and address it to the district's director of special education services or another district administrative employee.
Texas Education Code 29.004 then starts two clocks, and both are measured in school days, not calendar days.
Clock one — 15 school days to respond. On a written parent request, the district must act "not later than the 15th school day after the date the district receives the request," either by providing an opportunity for you to give written consent for the evaluation, or by refusing and providing notice of procedural safeguards under 20 U.S.C. 1415(b). A refusal is a formal act with paperwork attached, not a conversation that trails off.
Clock two — 45 school days to the report. Once you sign consent, the written evaluation report is due "not later than the 45th school day following the date on which the school district" received it. If your child is absent three or more days during that window, the period is extended by the number of school days missed.
The end-of-year rule. If consent is received at least 35 but fewer than 45 school days before the last instructional day of the year, the report is instead due by June 30, and the ARD committee "shall meet not later than the 15th school day of the following school year to consider the evaluation." In practice this means a request made in late April can legitimately not produce a meeting until the following September. If you are near that boundary and the timing matters, request earlier rather than later.
School days also exclude summers and breaks, so a 45-school-day evaluation requested in May is a very different wait than one requested in September. That alone is a reason many families start a private evaluation in parallel rather than instead.
Why School Sessions Look Different in Practice
This is where private practices usually start selling, so it is worth using ASHA's own numbers instead of ours.
ASHA's caseload and workload guidance reports that in the 2022 Schools Survey, the median monthly caseload for full-time, ASHA-certified, school-based SLPs working as clinical service providers was 48 students, with regional medians ranging from 36 to 55. ASHA deliberately declines to recommend a caseload cap, preferring a workload analysis approach — but it is candid about what large caseloads do:
Large caseloads may also limit service delivery options.
And, more pointedly:
caseload size, rather than student characteristics, frequently influences recommendations
about service intensity and model. ASHA adds that "large caseloads may necessitate a shift from individual to group treatment and from smaller to larger group sizes," which may not be ideal for a given student.
Read that in the right register. That is the national professional association describing a structural constraint on its own members. The school SLP who sees your child in a group of four for 30 minutes twice a month is very often an excellent clinician working inside arithmetic they did not choose. The honest comparison is not "school SLPs versus good SLPs." It is a service model shaped by caseload against one shaped by a single family's schedule.
Three practical consequences follow:
- Group delivery is common, which works well for some targets — social communication, carryover with peers — and poorly for others, such as early motor speech work that needs dense, individual repetition.
- Session frequency is written into an IEP and changing it requires a meeting.
- Scope is educational. School services address what affects access to education. They generally do not address orofacial myofunctional disorders, tongue thrust, feeding, or adult voice at all — not because school SLPs cannot, but because those are not educational-access questions.
The Summer Gap Is Negotiable, Not Automatic
School therapy stops when school stops, unless the team decides otherwise.
Under 34 CFR 300.106, extended school year services "must be provided only if a child's IEP Team determines, on an individual basis" that they are necessary for the child to receive a free appropriate public education. The flip side is written into the same rule: a district may not limit ESY to "particular categories of disability," and may not "unilaterally limit the type, amount, or duration of those services."
So ESY is a question to raise with evidence — specifically, evidence of regression over previous breaks and how long recoupment took. A district that answers with a blanket policy rather than an individual determination is not following the regulation. Many families bridge the summer privately instead, which is a perfectly reasonable choice; just know that asking was an option.
Private School Families: The Part Almost Nobody Knows
If your child attends a private or parochial school, two facts matter and they pull in opposite directions.
The evaluation is still available to you. Child Find reaches parentally-placed private school students. 34 CFR 300.131 requires the LEA to "locate, identify, and evaluate all children with disabilities" in its service area, including those in private schools, using activities "similar to the activities undertaken for the agency's public school children," completed "in a time period comparable to that for students attending public schools in the LEA." A free, comprehensive evaluation from the district where the private school sits is a real entitlement, and it is the single most underused one in this whole area.
The services that follow are not the same. 34 CFR 300.137(a) is blunt: "no parentally-placed private school child with a disability has an individual right to receive some or all of the special education and related services that the child would receive if enrolled in a public school." Anything provided comes through a services plan rather than an IEP, funded from a proportionate share of federal dollars, with a representative of the private school at the meeting.
The practical read: take the free evaluation, because a comprehensive assessment is worth having regardless of who delivers therapy. Then plan therapy around the assumption that the service attached to it will be thinner than a public-school IEP, and often considerably thinner.
What Private Therapy Changes
Four real differences, and the rest is marketing.
There is no educational-impact gate. If your child has a communication disorder, they can be seen. No adverse-effect finding, no team vote, no threshold.
You choose the clinician and the method. Districts assign providers. Privately you can select for a credential or a specific approach — a PROMPT-trained clinician for motor speech, DTTC for suspected childhood apraxia of speech, or someone who also holds orofacial myofunctional credentials when oral function and speech are tangled together. Our guide to how to choose a speech therapist in Dallas covers what to actually verify.
Sessions are individual and the calendar is yours. One-to-one time, no school-year boundary, and a frequency set from the clinical picture rather than from available slots. Sometimes that honestly means less therapy than a parent expected, not more.
The scope is wider. Orofacial myofunctional therapy, tongue thrust, feeding therapy, and adult speech and voice work sit outside what school services exist to do. For those concerns there is no school route to compare against.
What private therapy does not get you is free. Our speech therapy cost guide lays out the real ranges by setting, and insurance coverage for speech therapy covers what plans commonly do and do not pay.
Doing Both Is the Normal Answer
Nothing in IDEA restricts private therapy, and private therapy has no effect on school eligibility. The two run in parallel constantly, and our Dallas therapist guide says the same thing: a school SLP and a private specialist can work in parallel.
Make the parallel deliberate rather than accidental:
- Share the reports both ways. Give your private SLP the school's evaluation, and give the school team your private report. Both are better for having the other.
- Let the clinicians talk, with your written consent. Ten minutes between two SLPs prevents months of divergent goals.
- Divide rather than duplicate. If the school is working on classroom participation and carryover with peers, private sessions are the place for dense individual work on the sound or pattern underneath it.
- Use the free evaluation even if you plan to go private. It costs nothing and a second set of standardized scores is genuinely useful.
The failure mode is not doing both. It is doing both while neither clinician knows the other exists.
How to Decide
Start the school request in writing, dated, regardless. It costs nothing, it starts a legal clock, and an evaluation is worth having.
Read a denial as a legal answer, not a clinical one. "Does not adversely affect educational performance" is not "nothing is wrong." If good grades are the only stated reason, ask what else was considered — and ask in writing.
Count school days, not weeks. A request in late spring can legitimately land in September. If timing matters, start privately in parallel.
If you need a specific method or credential, that is a private question. Districts assign providers; they do not take requests for a particular training.
If the concern is feeding, oral function, tongue thrust, or adult voice, there is no school comparison. Those are private-practice questions from the start.
If your child is in private school, claim the evaluation and expect less service. Child Find applies; an individual right to services does not.
What Bloom Does and Does Not Do
Bloom Speech and Myofunctional Therapy is a private practice. We do not contract with school districts, we do not determine IDEA eligibility, and we do not write IEPs — those decisions belong to your district's ARD team, and we would not want a parent walking into that meeting thinking we have a vote in it.
What we can do is evaluate independently and hand you a formal written report with findings and recommendations, typically within one to two weeks of the evaluation, which is yours to bring to the school team. Beyond that, we treat the things school services are not built to address: orofacial myofunctional disorders, tongue thrust, feeding, motor speech approaches, and adult communication and voice. Sessions run in person at our Dallas office with Laura Friedman, MS, CCC-SLP, QOM, or through online speech therapy nationwide. Our pediatric speech therapy page covers what that looks like for school-age children specifically.
And if your child is already receiving school services that are working, we will tell you that too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between school speech therapy and private speech therapy?
They answer two different questions. School services answer a legal one: does this child have a disability that adversely affects educational performance, such that specially designed instruction is needed? Private therapy answers a clinical one: does this child have a communication disorder worth treating? A child can clearly fail the first test and clearly pass the second, which is the most common reason a family pays privately for a child the school has already evaluated. Neither answer is wrong — they are different questions in different bodies of law.
Why did the school say my child does not qualify for speech therapy?
Almost always because of the second prong of a three-part test. ASHA describes school eligibility as asking whether there is a disability, whether there is "an adverse effect on educational performance resulting from the disability," and whether specially designed instruction or related services are needed. Federal regulation defines a speech or language impairment as a communication disorder "that adversely affects a child's educational performance." A child can have a genuine, diagnosable disorder and still not clear that prong in the team's judgment — which is an eligibility answer, not a clinical one.
Can the school deny speech therapy because my child's grades are fine?
Not on that basis alone. ASHA's summary of the Department of Education's 1980 and 2007 policy letters states that "it is emphasized in each letter that educational performance is not limited to academic performance," and that "a student with a disability cannot be denied service even if there are no concomitant academic problems." Educational performance includes functional and social communication, participation, and nonacademic settings. If good grades are the only stated reason for a denial, ask for the determination in writing along with your procedural safeguards notice.
How do I request a school speech evaluation in Texas, and how long does it take?
Put it in writing, date it, and send it to the district's director of special education services or another district administrative employee. Texas Education Code 29.004 requires the district to act "not later than the 15th school day after the date the district receives the request" — either offering you the chance to give written consent, or refusing and providing procedural safeguards notice. Once you consent, the written report is due "not later than the 45th school day" after consent was received, extended if your child misses three or more days. If consent arrives at least 35 but fewer than 45 school days before the last instructional day, the report is due by June 30 and the ARD committee meets by the 15th school day of the next year.
Why does school speech therapy happen in groups?
Usually caseload arithmetic rather than a decision about your child. ASHA's caseload and workload guidance reports a median monthly caseload of 48 students for full-time school-based SLPs in the 2022 Schools Survey, with regional medians from 36 to 55, and states that "large caseloads may also limit service delivery options," that "caseload size, rather than student characteristics, frequently influences recommendations" about intensity, and that large caseloads "may necessitate a shift from individual to group treatment and from smaller to larger group sizes." That is ASHA describing a constraint on its own members, not a criticism of school clinicians.
Does school speech therapy continue over the summer?
Only if the IEP team decides it must. Extended school year services "must be provided only if a child's IEP Team determines, on an individual basis" that they are necessary for a free appropriate public education. The same regulation forbids limiting ESY to "particular categories of disability" or "unilaterally limit[ing] the type, amount, or duration of those services." Bring evidence of regression over previous breaks; a blanket district policy is not an individual determination.
My child is in private school. Can we still get a school evaluation?
Yes. Child Find reaches parentally-placed private school students: the LEA where the private school is located must "locate, identify, and evaluate all children with disabilities," using activities "similar to" those for its public school children and within a "comparable" timeframe. What follows is narrower — "no parentally-placed private school child with a disability has an individual right to receive some or all of the special education and related services that the child would receive if enrolled in a public school." Services come through a services plan funded from a proportionate share, not an IEP. Take the evaluation; expect thinner service.
Can my child have both school and private speech therapy?
Yes, and it is the most common arrangement. Nothing in IDEA restricts private therapy, and private therapy does not affect school eligibility. Share the school's evaluation with your private SLP and your private report with the school team, and with written consent let the two clinicians compare goals so they reinforce the same targets instead of running unrelated programs.
Is Bloom a school district provider?
No. Bloom is a private practice. We do not contract with districts, determine IDEA eligibility, or write IEPs — those belong to your district's ARD team. What we can do is evaluate independently and give you a formal written report with findings and recommendations, typically within one to two weeks, which you can bring to the school. We also treat what school services generally do not address at all: orofacial myofunctional disorders, tongue thrust, feeding, and adult voice and fluency.
Told Your Child Does Not Qualify?
A "no" from a school district is an answer to a question about educational access. It is not an assessment of whether your child needs help. Schedule a free consultation with Laura Friedman, MS, CCC-SLP, QOM — in person in Dallas or online nationwide — to talk through what the school's report actually found, what it did not look at, and whether private therapy is warranted now. If the school's plan is already the right one, you will hear that instead.