School-based therapy services allow your child to receive therapy related to the school environment and achievement of academic goals. Outpatient therapy services allow your child to receive therapy focused on goals within the home and community environments. If you are currently receiving outpatient therapy services, please consult with your child’s therapy provider about receiving services concurrently and what questions or concerns you may have.

Attending OT services in the school and outpatient settings enables the child to receive intervention across all environments to thoroughly address their needs within the school, home, and community environments. While school-based services support the child’s academic achievement, outpatient services can support the child’s independence and engagement in age expected skills in a variety of areas such as self-cares, play, emotional regulation, independent living skills, and social skills through interventions targeting strength, coordination, sensory processing, motor planning, regulation and executive functioning.

A child would benefit from PT in both settings if they are having difficulty in both the school setting and home/community setting. Services at school are focused on accessing the school environment and the student’s education. The medical model of an outpatient clinic can focus more on home, community, and specific medical needs. Just because a child is getting PT in one of the settings, does not mean they automatically need PT in both settings nor does it mean that they cannot receive PT in the other setting.

For some children, the frequency or intensity of physical therapy they receive at school will not meet all of the child’s needs for physical therapy. There may be goals that are not addressed by school-based therapy that would require services from the medical model of an outpatient clinic.

Speech therapy in an outpatient setting allows a child to receive services related to deficits or difficulties that present related to overall communication (e.g. speech, language, social pragmatic language, AAC, feeding/oral motor, fluency, etc) within the home and community environment. School-based services can begin when a child turns 3 years old and focus on if there is an educational impact, such as speech/language impairments that impact the student’s performance educationally. If there are concerns with overall communication abilities within the home and community environment, outpatient speech therapy may be beneficial. Outpatient speech therapy can focus on early language speech/language intervention, speech sound production, feature matching for speech generating devices and AAC trials, feeding and swallowing goals, social pragmatic language, fluency, apraxia of speech, and carryover/home programming for families related to speech/language areas of need.

In short, yes! Following an evaluation, the outpatient speech language pathologist will determine qualification. It is common for patients to be discharged from school-based speech services prior to discharging from outpatient, as well as qualifying for outpatient despite not qualify for school-based services. School based services are often picked up if their speech and/or language delay is directly impacting the child’s educational performance. For example, a student might not have their /r/ sound, which might not negatively impact their reading or spelling scores. Therefore, the student would not receive services within the school setting. In outpatient services, goals are established directly addressing family concerns.