We have started the process to transition Peanut from the Early Intervention Program to the Child Find program. For us, this is both exciting and scary. It is exciting because EI has a maximum level of assistance that they can offer and he already gets the maximum of 4 speech therapy sessions a month. Child Find offers an infinite level of assistance based on the need of the child. It is scary because we have the best SLP ever who is both prompt trained and works with a lot of kids with apraxia and we aren't guaranteed to get an SLP through Child Find that has the same expertise. Traditional speech therapy techniques don't work for a child with apraxia so that would be very detrimental to his progress.
This is a very long drawn out process so while he doesn't have to transition until he turns 3 in March we started the process so that there wouldn't be any time between services. We have competed the first step which was where Peanut and I met with a panel of people who would determine if they needed to get further testing for Peanut to determine his eligibility. So we met with a speech language pathologist, a psychologist, a pediatric diagnostician, a social worker and a case manager (yes, this meeting was a bit intimidating) and after talking to me, reading what our SLP wrote up and getting to hear Peanut talk a little bit they determined that they don't need further testing to determine eligibility. This made me happy because I didn't have to put Peanut through any more testing but at the same time it made me a little sad that they could tell he needed their help after only 10 minutes with us.
He is scheduled for a hearing test and we are going back to the pediatric ophthalmologist to see if his eye sight has corrected at all. (We already know it is inevitable that he will need glasses but haven't determined when he will start wearing them.)
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