Delaying intervention is never a good choice when a child is below his/her expected skill level in any area but especially in communication skills. The earlier the intervention begins the better to start closing the gap between where he/she is and where he/she should be.

Aggressive early intervention for any significant speech and language problems is always the best option.

"Why pay for private speech therapy;
my child can get speech therapy when he starts school"

The fact that there is no charge to you for the speech and language therapy services your child receives at school is not sufficient reason to wait for intervention or to make school speech/language therapy services your only source of intervention. All therapy sessions are not equal. The main consideration should always be is this intervention meeting my child needs in both effectiveness and frequency.

"Why speech and language therapy outside of school a great option?"

1. One possible problem with waiting to initiate therapy is that the gap in the speech and language skills your child has and the speech and language skills his typically developing peers have gets wider over time. This means your child has the potential to fall further and further behind peers than would be the case if therapy were started at the first sign of a problem. Waiting for your child to start school is waiting too long to address any significant problem.
2. The caseload for the typical school speech therapist is usually fairly large and the school therapist sometimes must travel between two or more schools to see all her speech students. There are many students who need to be seen for therapy and not always enough time to provide adequate therapy services to each. In school it may not be possible to see a child for an individual session when needed (as is recommended for a child with speech apraxia) so he will be seen in a small group therapy situation or the school SLP may not be able to see the speech student for a sufficient amount of time each week simply because of the number of students with IEP's for speech needing to be seen. If the child is scheduled for a 20 to 30 minute session in a group of 3 twice a week your child would be receiving only about 7 to 10 minutes of direct therapy per session. That is not a lot of time to accomplish his speech improvement objectives. Also in the school setting a child may lose out on scheduled speech therapy classes for things such as snow days, early dismissal, special assemblies, holiday breaks, and summer vacation for example. School therapy is most valuable for the more routine speech differences that children sometimes exhibit but the more involved children may need more intensive or specialized intervention services.
3. In school based therapy programs there is virtually no opportunity for parent involvement or meaningful communication with the SLP. Parents typically don't observe school therapy or learn the specifics of their child's delays or how to support and generalize newly acquired speech and language skills. They may not even know about the small accomplishments in therapy that need to be celebrated.
4. Not only is starting private speech/language therapy early a prudent course of action but it is also a good idea to have private therapy in conjunction with or sometimes instead of school therapy. One of the most persuasive arguments in support of the idea of speech/language therapy taking place outside the school setting is that there is a lot that goes on in the school classroom that your child needs to be present for in order to just keep up. Being pulled out of the classroom to go to speech therapy class means a student may be missing out on something that he should be in class for or something he may want to be in class for such as math or science or a favorite subject. Therapy can become an unpleasant or negative activity when this is the case. And in a worst case scenario the child may be struggling in a particular subject and have to miss that class to go to speech making it harder to keep up.

For some school age children speech and language therapy at school may be enough and it may not interfere with school subjects but it may not be enough or the right kind of intervention depending on the nature and severity of the speech and language problems. All these things need to be considered.