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Early intervention/ Speech Therapy
Hi. At DD's pedi appointment today she referred DD to EI for speech therapy since she is not speaking yet. I was wondering if anyone could give me some insight into what to expect. Back when I was in OT school I did some co-treatments with SLPs, but that was a long time ago and I was coming from the perspective of a nervous student (now I'm a nervous parent).
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Re: Early intervention/ Speech Therapy
Well of course every system is a little different but I'm happy to walk you through our start.
Oct.-I self referred DS #1 and got an appointment two weeks later to meet with EI coordinator.
Mid Oct- Meet with Coordinator. Do lots of paperwork, my answering ?'s about a variety of DS habits, developmental milestones, my areas of concerns and a whole bunch of does he do this, that or the other thing. Coordinator tells me she'll be recommending ST for sure and sending his file to OT for their input.
End Of Oct- Eval with ST. Eval with OT and Eval with Developmental Therapist
ST- receives an age rating of 9 months (he's 23 months). DT he receives a rating around 14 months, OT rates him as on the border and a quirky kid but doesn't think he needs OT services.
Beginning of Nov,- Finally get all approvals in only to find out that EI only starts services the first of the month after approvals are given. Since our approvals were given on Nov.5th this means we had to wait until Dec to start therapy. Our exception is starting therapy covered by insurance, which was ST once a week with the same ST that EI provided.
Also while in the beginning no one said anything to me it was glaringly obvious that all of the evaluators thought for sure my son had ASD. They all later admitted to me how shocked they were after a few weeks of working with him what a different kid he was from the test days and that he absolutely was not autistic. I think it was a good reminder for everyone involved that these people spend 30 min-1hr with your kid and it's not possible to see everything.
It didn't take long for us to get into a groove with treatments, we had ST twice a week and OT once a week. I had another little one at home so in the beginning we scheduled around his nap time and I had a rare quiet break of time to myself and later when #2 was mobile and felt left out the therapists were great about incorporating him as they could. I ended up having very close friendships with his therapists and loved having them come so much. It was difficult on all of us when he no longer needed them.
We got the referral and I scheduled the appt for the eval. They came out and did some basic paperwork and then came back about 2 weeks later and did the full eval. She only qualified for speech (18 months with speech of less than 1 year) but did not qualify for pt or ot even though she was right on the border and we lobbied for it.
We ended up leaving EI because it was the free system that I grew up with in IN, but rather income based and our insurance did not cover EI. We ended up paying $50 for every 15 minutes of speech, the lady never showed up on time and we only got 2 appts a month. We found a private slp covered by our insurance who we now pay less than $15 for every 45 minute appt (2 a week during the school year, 3 during the summer....DD also gets speech 2x week at school now that she's over age 3). We're looking at several more years of speech since she has apraxia, so its important that we trust our providers. They've watched both my girls grow up and are already excited about our baby on the way.