Reply to Accomodations for selective mutism (MCPS)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It will be.tough for a SM kid in an mcps kindergarten. Even with a great teacher and administrative support, there will be 20 plus kids in the class. Your quiet non disruptive child won't get much in the way of attention or accommodations.  The SM kids i have encountered have been very entrenched in not speaking....it can last for many years. [/quote]

1. Not all MCPS kindergarten classes are that large. Ours has 16 kids. Look for focus schools that receive allocations to lower class sizes.
2. SM is treatable. The challenge is that MCPS is a large system and doing things differently can be hard. If a child is still in private preschool/daycare, I would recommend leaning into treating SM now. Hire a therapist with experience in PCIT-SM (Meredith Polsky and Lindsay Scharfstein are each amazing) to do fade ins at the school. Learn PCIT-SM skills and do exposures outside of school, set up a reward system for brave talking outside of school. We did this and it felt so hard at the time financially and logistically but it was 100% worth every penny and all the time and energy. Try to get into an SM camp over the summer if you can. That will set them up for success in public school.

Once you get to MCPS it will be much harder to get a private therapist into the school and they don't know how to treat SM. That being said, they do have some amazing teachers, and if you are lucky you may be able to work with the teacher to get them to incorporate some elements of PCIT-SM to supplement what you do outside of school. Go through the IEP/504 processes but know they are long and very underwhelming. You will spend many hours discussing your kid with the school staff and getting unsolicited and unhelpful parenting advice, and you won't get out of it an evidence-based plan to overcome the SM, just maybe to accommodate it.

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