08/20/2026
https://www.specialeducationaction.com/p/student-who-uses-a-letterboard-wins
A nonspeaking autistic student who communicates by pointing to letters on a letter board —with support from a trained Communication and Regulation Partner—won a rare due-process case against Fairfax County Public Schools in May of this year.
His IEP identified spelling as his primary communication method and recognized that he required support from a trusted person trained in that method. The district was legally obligated to implement his IEP—but it questioned, delayed, and failed to provide that access.
Part of what this case exposes is the tension between two very different ways of understanding communication.
A Speech-Language Pathologist may understandably approach communication through the professional framework in which they were trained—speech, language, conventional AAC, and, for some SLPs, motor-speech disorders. When a method falls outside that framework, it can feel unfamiliar or even threatening to established professional knowledge.
But S2C is not speech therapy. It is not attempting to teach the mouth to produce speech.
S2C teaches the purposeful motor skills needed to communicate by pointing to letters. For many spellers, this begins with larger gross-motor movements and gradually becomes the increasingly refined hand-eye coordination, motor planning, initiation, inhibition, accuracy, and isolated finger movement required to target letters.
That is a different focus—and that is okay.
No single profession has to possess every piece of the answer.
Collaboration should allow us to expand what is possible, not defend professional territory at the expense of disabled people.
Many nonspeaking, minimally speaking, and unreliably speaking people experience apraxia: a significant difficulty initiating, planning, and executing purposeful movement, even when they understand what they want to do.
Speech is itself an extraordinarily complex motor act.
A person may have language, memories, knowledge, opinions, and complete thoughts while being unable to make their mouth reliably express them.
S2C works on a different motor pathway: intentionally moving the body to point to letters and spell.
That distinction is essential. A body that cannot reliably produce speech is not evidence of an empty mind. A body that struggles to follow a spoken direction is not proof that the person did not understand it.
We cannot continue confusing motor performance with cognition.
Yet in this case, a school SLP reportedly concluded that the student’s spelled communication was not his own without ever observing him communicating with his trained CRP. When asked why she had not observed him, she said, “I don’t believe in it, and I didn’t.”
That is a problem.
Professional discomfort is understandable. Refusing to observe, remain curious, or consider evidence from the actual student is not.
Meanwhile, this student testified for approximately two and a half hours.
Two and half hours.
He communicated about his education, his support needs, his difficulty living in a body that does not always follow his brain, and the pain of not being recognized for who he truly is.
The hearing officer found him credible, competent, intelligent, respectful, and compelling.
The hearing officer understood what the system had failed to understand: You cannot measure what a student knows while blocking the way that student communicates.
Without appropriate communication support, an evaluation may measure the barrier—not the student.
This student and his family were up against a school system, central administration, attorneys, institutional deference to educators, and the authority of a national professional association (ASHA). They were challenging systems that routinely give more credibility to professional status than to disabled people’s lived experiences.
And they prevailed.
It is also important to understand that S2C is not an unstructured idea someone invented in a living room. It was developed in 2015 by Elizabeth Vosseller—who ironically (or not) is herself a Speech-Language Pathologist with decades of experience supporting people with complex sensory-motor and communication differences.
In 2019, she founded the International Association for Spelling as Communication (I-ASC). Its mission is to advance communication access for nonspeaking people globally through training, education, advocacy, and research. I-ASC trains practitioners and Communication and Regulation Partners, promotes consistent and ethical practices, supports research, and—most importantly—centers the knowledge and leadership of nonspeaking people themselves. Learn more about I-ASC.
This work is now changing lives across communities and countries.
It is not the speller’s fault that our professional institutions, educational systems, and research structures have not kept pace with what is providing meaningful communication access for many people around the world.
Spellers should not have to wait for every institution to catch up before they are permitted to communicate.
We should absolutely ask questions, build research, create safeguards, and protect authorship. We should also observe the individual, collect meaningful data, remain curious, collaborate across disciplines, and listen to the people whose lives are directly affected.
Disbelief is not evidence.
Professional authority is not infallibility.
And an IEP is not optional.
The hearing officer found that Fairfax County Public Schools denied this student a Free Appropriate Public Education by failing to implement his communication access in a timely manner.
THIS is why I do what I do.
Because communication access creates possibilities for education, relationships, autonomy, advocacy, emotional healing, meaningful work, and a dramatically increased quality of life.
Nonspeaking students deserve to be educated—not underestimated. They deserve access to robust communication and the opportunity to demonstrate what they know.
This student was never voiceless.
The system was refusing to listen.
A Virginia hearing officer found Fairfax County Public Schools denied FAPE after failing to timely implement the student’s communication access.
