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Intervention
Mar. 16th, 2011 03:39 pmWe had an EI evaluation with Hotspur yesterday, which very nearly made me crazy. The young lady has been diagnosed - by a pediatric specialist - with a speech delay. In December, we agreed that the delay was minor and we should re-evaluate in a few months. In March, it was clear that while the young lady was making progress, she was also falling further behind. The speech therapist recommended weekly therapy.
The easiest way to get weekly speech therapy is through Early Intervention, so we called them up and scheduled an evaluation. Hotspur has been on the EI radar since birth. She was initially evaluated at two months of age. She was evaluated again at ten months (back in July), at which time she had just enough speech delay (2 months) to qualify for services. I said great, we'll take services, and then her EI therapist moved out of state, her newly assigned EI person quit in a huff (not at me, just a huff), and we fell between the cracks. So we called up EI and convinced them to start with us all over. They came out to the daycare and visited with Hotspur yesterday.
The eval took forever, and it was pretty frustrating. Hotspur was not in the best of moods. She was more interested in the contents of my bag than in the stuff that they kept trying to get her interested in, and she regarded the evaluators as though any minute they were going to stop flapping about with balls and blocks and pegboards and try to sell her mortgage-backed bonds. She spent much of the cognitive portion of the evaluation trying to show them how to play peek-a-boo with their washcloths, and some of the rest eating the cheerios she was supposed to be dropping into cups.
Since July, Hotspur's language delays have widened from two months to five months, but the requirements to qualify for services have widened from two months to six. She doesn't come close to qualifying in any other area. Much time was spent attempting to discount her abilities in order to qualify her, but in the end, they gave up. She has a speech delay, they recommend a clinical evaluation by their own specialist to see if that can qualify her (none of yesterdays evaluators were specialists of any kind), and then, I suppose, we'll see.
The easiest way to get weekly speech therapy is through Early Intervention, so we called them up and scheduled an evaluation. Hotspur has been on the EI radar since birth. She was initially evaluated at two months of age. She was evaluated again at ten months (back in July), at which time she had just enough speech delay (2 months) to qualify for services. I said great, we'll take services, and then her EI therapist moved out of state, her newly assigned EI person quit in a huff (not at me, just a huff), and we fell between the cracks. So we called up EI and convinced them to start with us all over. They came out to the daycare and visited with Hotspur yesterday.
The eval took forever, and it was pretty frustrating. Hotspur was not in the best of moods. She was more interested in the contents of my bag than in the stuff that they kept trying to get her interested in, and she regarded the evaluators as though any minute they were going to stop flapping about with balls and blocks and pegboards and try to sell her mortgage-backed bonds. She spent much of the cognitive portion of the evaluation trying to show them how to play peek-a-boo with their washcloths, and some of the rest eating the cheerios she was supposed to be dropping into cups.
Since July, Hotspur's language delays have widened from two months to five months, but the requirements to qualify for services have widened from two months to six. She doesn't come close to qualifying in any other area. Much time was spent attempting to discount her abilities in order to qualify her, but in the end, they gave up. She has a speech delay, they recommend a clinical evaluation by their own specialist to see if that can qualify her (none of yesterdays evaluators were specialists of any kind), and then, I suppose, we'll see.
