Advocating: Sensory Needs

How do you advocate for your child's sensory needs. Well, where I live this is a huge issue. The public schools and their evaluation teams don't recognize sensory integration issues. The problem has been that sensory integration, though readily accepted in most other developmental disciplines, is still suspect in the educational community. It takes many years to have results back in research in an area and sensory integration is young enough that here hasn't been a lot of studies completed. Studies are often 10 or 20 years in length and the results are just emerging now. Educational institutions want any accommodations or teaching strategies to be research based so that is where disconnect has been between education and therapy disciplines.







As I have had some intense conversations with educators on this issue, I have learned to "advocate" for sensory in a way where I don't ever mention the word sensory. After arguing with a school based autism strategist over adding two 3 minute sensory breaks of "heavy work" to an IEP, In desperation, I tried another approach.

I asked if this child could pick a friend daily to carry a tub of the lunch boxes left in the cafeteria. This would be about 3 minutes of sensory heavy work daily but I changed my advocating strategy. This became a part of his daily social interventions. This was viewed by the school as a social break and a chance for this child to have a meaningful social connection with a non special education peer.

This encounter happen several years ago. What I learned is that sometimes advocating takes a "backdoor approach." If you aren't being successful at gaining a sensory or any other accommodation/goal, could the activity address another area. Honestly, it is important to find ways to meet more than one objective at a time. This requires a little "out of the box thinking" but it will help your child to achieve more if you can advocate wisely.


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