Do private therapy and supplement with the school. Ultimately you and your child will have to live the results. The school alone isn’t the going to go all in to fix it

You have every right to request that the speech hours remain the same. The biggest reason to reduce hours, besides making progress and needing less, is that the speech hours are lost class time. In middle school, if a student has a resource class, that's fine if they get pulled out of there. But often the missed class time becomes an issue. When I worked in elementary school, I had a student who was consistently pulled out of social studies because that was considered least important given her academic IEP goals. However, she was missing so much social studies that she was not able to complete a lot of the graded work and it became an issue. So at any level, missed class time is something to consider.

I'm a special ed teacher in the county and this is my advice:

Absolutely bring up your concerns during the meeting. You can do this in a professional way, just explain that you think your child still needs those services and you are very concerned about reducing them. Ask right out if the hours could continue as they have been. MANY times service providers who want to reduce services will defer to a parent if they are asked directly to maintain services during an IEP meeting.

If the answer is still no and they persist with reducing services you say, "I would like my disagreement to be reflected in the Prior Written Notice."

You have rights of due process and you can (and should) contact RACU.

My guess from experience is the SLP will continue to provide the services you want if they see you really disagree with reducing services. Now, it may be that the SLP really believes your child benefits more from being in the classroom rather than pulled, but you have every right to disagree, have that documented, and pursue your due process rights. You CAN be firm while also not being insulting.

You’ll get a lot more replies on this in the special needs forum. One thing to keep in mind is that the speech concerns need to be impacting your child’s academics. So, for example, if they cannot articulate S properly, but they spell and read correctly, and it’s just articulation, they will not qualify for MCPS speech even though there’s still a speech concern.