Early intervention programs are generally funded by state’s Department of Health in each state. The main aim of this program is to help children in their development. Generally pediatricians and parents come forward at starting such programs.
The EI Process:
- Choosing an Early Intervention Provider.
- Arrangement of testing: perform the whole process the soonest as wasting more time will not help your child. Your child grows fast and so everyday counts. Your information should be immediatley forwarded to the EI office, who can assign an ID number to your child and then permit to proceed. This should not take more than 2-3 days.
- Assigning A Service coordinator: He can advocate over your rights and your child’s needs to chose over the best provider. He will have a check on all your activities and all your conversations will be kept confidential. He can prepare consent documents and take care of all insurance procedures.
- Choosing the place of tests: Home or centres are ideally chosen by all. You need to chose a place according to the comfort level of your child.
- Developmental Test: A general test is conducted by a Special Educator. It does not work for developments in specific areas but for overall development.
- Other tests should be conducted after seeing the results of the developmental tests. These may include – speech evaluation, physical ability evaluation and others.
- Eligibility of your child is then checked after performing all tests. A child can have ideally 33% delay in an area to undergo services to develop them. If your child is already 33% delayed in one area, then he can be up to 25% delayed in another area. A new test may be requested if utmost satisfaction is not found with results.
- Meeting EI schedule:After the eligibility testing, a meeting may be scheduled by the Service Provider with the Early Intervention team including an EI Official Designee, at least one of the evaluation team member.
- The EI Meeting: All services, parent training, home care, emergency care, family counselling are discussed here.
- Services: Interviewing and screening a therapist who can work with your child. You can even opt for new therapists if you are not satisfied with your therapist. You can always be present during the whole duration of the therapy over your child. But your presence should not distract your child or disturb the session.
A child with communication disorder can be helped with improving over his conditions when he will receive proper therapy at 3 years of age. These programs can help improving the cognitive, social, linguistic and emotional effects. Designing special curriculum, introducing special instructional practices, modifications on old practices etc may be done to make the efforts very effective.
