Every child who needs AAC, gets AAC.

Happy AAC Awareness month! Have you ever heard the term, “underidentification”? Within a special education context, it means that we haven’t yet found all the students who have a particular disability, or who need a particular service. 

At an individual level, this means that a child isn’t getting all the support they need and deserve. At a systems level, underidentification is a self-perpetuating, nearly invisible problem. Put simply, the less people who have AAC, the less people know about AAC, and then the less people who have AAC, and so on.

And this is why AAC Awareness month is so critically important: so that we can reach every person who needs it.  

Some super quick math:

There are currently about 2 million AAC users in the USA, but there are an estimated 5 million AAC users, and only about 180,000 SLPs. How long will it take everyone to get an AAC device if they must have a lengthy evaluation by an SLP, and then fight with their school district or insurance company to follow the SLP’s recommendations?

• Answer: Unsolvable without a crystal ball, but clearly, WAY TOO LONG! 

Let’s try a different problem: Approximately 1.3% of humans need AAC. If your school district has a total population of 10,000 students, how many will need a robust, personalized device?

• Answer: About 130 students, because 100% of users need some form of robust, personalized device (more on that next month). 

Right now, most school districts are drastically under-identifying for AAC needs.

Fortunately, it’s really easy to figure out if your district is under-identifying if you just know this one crucial number: 1.3%. 

(Which is why I'm going to keep saying it! ;))

Let’s now put that 1.3% number in context, because by itself, it sounds small, doesn't it?

Approximately 1.8% of people in developing countries use a wheelchair. And everyone knows what a wheelchair is! And yet very few people know what AAC means, or how it can help. We can change that, simply by sharing about it!

What we would do at “LUVUSD” –

In my dream school district, which I’ve nicknamed "LUVUSD", administrators would be equally as aware of this 1.3% number as they are of other numbers like, “About 13 to 15% of students are enrolled in special education as a whole each year.” 

Plus, they’d be aware of how many AAC Specialists are needed to serve those kids. So to take our math problem from before: if LUVUSD has 10,000 students, then about 130 of those will need a robust, personalized AAC device. The district would have about two full-time AAC Specialists on staff to make sure that all kids, families, and staff members have the support they need to customize the devices, and learn to use them daily.  

It’s not just a dream -  

In a survey of school-based AAC and AT Specialists that I did last year, there were a few respondents who said they had indeed identified all the kids who needed AAC, and they had reasonable caseloads!

How did they do it?

Well, in some cases, they lucked out and got an administrator who was an SLP, or the parent of an AAC user, and wow… doesn’t that sound amazing? Someone who just “gets it”? 

But in other cases, an AAC Specialist was able to slowly build relationships with the people around them and the key word there is slowly. It takes sustained effort, and for a person to stay in one place over many years. I’ve tried all kinds of ways to accelerate things and I can tell you firsthand: nothing works as well as moving at the speed of trust. 

What we can all do today -

Okay, so we just can’t magically build a dream school district with a twitch of our nose (I've tried this too, especially in spooky season).

But you know what we can all do in just a few clicks?

Tell more people about this 1.3% number, what it means, and why it matters. 

• This month, I'm sharing a series of posts all about this, and you can reshare whichever one speaks to you on Instagram.

If your district is under-identifying for AAC right now, and you want to work toward a program that meets students’ needs, here are some resources:

• A free Under-Identification Worksheet (with sources for these numbers, so you can share with your whole team)

• Project Core (for staff training at scale) 

• Placer County Open Access Project (for capacity-building)

• AAC Screening (for getting more devices, to more kids, more quickly)

And if you are a parent trying to get access to an AAC device for your child in today’s imperfect system, here are some resources to help with that:

• AAC Advocacy for Parents

• Instagram: How to get AAC if you don't have an SLP

• Top 15 Free AAC Resources 

Next month, I’ll tell you more about what I mean by “robust, personalized AAC devices,” and what can happen when we start by presuming potential.