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Special Needs
Deborah621
member
Introduction and a few questions
Deborah621
member
Hi everyone,
I have been a lurking a little over here for a while but wanted to introduce myself and I also have a couple of questions that hopefully someone can answer for me.
My son is 21 months and has delays in expressive and receptive language. He has been in EI for a few months now. He has no words yet. His doctor wants him to have a speech and language eval at Children's. I just want to know what to expect with the eval. Is it going to be like the EI eval he got? Is it going to be mainly based on my reporting or them observing him? He is very reserved around new people/situations. Are they going to ask about other forms communication like gesturing such as waving, clapping pointing, etc? He was very late to do all of these, and he still does not point. He usually just flails around until I figure it out.
Thank you so much ladies 
This discussion has been closed.
Re: Introduction and a few questions
My DS is going in for a hospital speech eval. also. I think the difference is that EI is an early interventionist doing the eval, whereas at the hospital it will be a licensed speech therapist with lots of experience identifying specific issues. I am guessing it will be more in-depth and that they will look at ruling out other factors which might be causing the delay.
My DS sounds kind of like yours-- more reserved in new situations. I talked with his OT and PT this week and they both recommended I let the speech therapist know the kind of things that get him to relax and vocalize. For him, it's vestibular input, so bouncing on a yoga ball or being swung through the air by mommy is a good ice breaker. I am also going to bring a few of his favorite toys from home.
HTH! Good luck.
Interesting. My daughter had a speech evaluation done through EI and it was administered by a licensed SLP (in fact, all of her evaluations were done by therapists licensed in their field). We do have an early interventionist/case manager assigned to us, but she does not do evaluations.
Well, my state *is* a little "different" than others, from what I read here. I do not recall a speech therapist being present for DS' initial evaluation. And, as I have explained in previous posts, the therapy he gets through EI is on a "consultative" basis, so a person I have never met or heard from is supposedly going to his day care every now and then and giving his teachers tips on what to do to help him develop language. Apparently this is the same person who evaluated him as at 3 months language development when he was 13 months old. You would think that big of a deficit would at least merit a phone call or email to the parent.
So for my personal experience, the EI evals and therapies are not something I am comfortable relying on as my child's sole source of intervention. From the sound of it, many of you receive frequent therapies from highly qualified therapists. That's just not the case for us, and I was speaking based on what we have experienced.
Hope this clarifies it.
Flora--that pretty much stinks! I would be going outside the system in your case too!
We have an EI affiliated OT, PT and an SLP who all come to us weekly (granted, if my insurance were not paying for it, EI would supplement SLP weekly and OT, PT would only be every other week). They do assessments every 6 months and they are the "little kid" versions of the ones we use in our elementary school. We love two of them so much that we will probably continue to use them instead of the preschool ones once LA ages out of EI.
A bit off topic, but we are about to add speech based hippotherapy to the mix--but that is outside of EI.
Thank you both for your help
He is in EI but he does not see a SLP. He has a developmental teacher that comes to the house once a week to work wih him on speech. He also just recently got into a play group.which will be weekly. Flora what state are you in? I am in MA. I didn't realize how much EI varied from state to state.
I am in OH. When I asked about the whole "consultative model" issue the response was "our agency chose to use this model" so I am not sure what it is like outside my county. I think there is a lot of need and not enough money, so the responsibility is pushed onto families to either get Medicaid or completely shoulder the burden themselves. Thankfully, there is a Medicaid funded secondary insurance program for handicapped children which we qualified for. That pays for the bulk of DS' therapies, hospitalizations and testing costs which my traditional insurance from my job does not cover.
There is a weird dichotomy. I think agencies worry a lot about "at risk" kids, with good reason. They may not be at financial risk because they qualify for Medicaid and lots of other free services, but they also may not have parents who can handle getting them to appointments and keeping them in a safe environment. That said, I think that working families with special needs children are "at risk" financially.
But anyways, sorry to get this thread off on a tangent, ladies! If your insurance will cover the hospital evaluation, I think it can only help you get a more vivid picture of how to help your child. That has been one benefit of doing EI, even though it does not provide the in-depth therapy for DS. I still get ideas and perspectives about DS to mull over from another source. Sorry if I sounded like I was downing EI earlier.
ETA: Justinlove, speech based hippotherapy sounds *awesome*. You will have to start a thread about that and give us the details!!