Briefly discuss salient points of three laws that apply to SLPs providing services to the public, for children or adults.
1. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 1990, children with autism and traumatic brain injury are included in the spectrum of those who were noted to be “speech impaired” and thus in need of speech therapy. IDEA is an advancement of the original Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which previously allowed services only for children who were specifically classified as “speech impaired.” The inclusion of children with autism and traumatic brain injury allowed children with these disabilities to receive speech-language services through the school system based on their IEP (Dwight,