unhappy with how early intervention is going--advice on how to handle

[Anonymous]

I just want to say that we were overall pleased with the services provided by MCITP. We moved from DC to MC just for the services and it was worth it. Not sure if things have changed dramatically in the past two years since we aged out of the program but we had two years of therapists coming to our house 4 days per week and they helped our child and us tremendously. We did not start speech therapy until our child
was about 2 years old...but, we did do SPIN first and we also took the Hanen Class "It Takes Two to Talk" which was very helpful. We did switch providers once during the two years. When we were not seeing progress on goals after the first 6 months w/ the speech therapist we swtched to a new one and it was a better fit. After our child turned 3 and moved onto the PEP Program we started doing all private therapists. They are great too.....there are many good places for therapy in MC...check with your insurance company to see which places they will cover. My child has significant needs and a diagnosis since birth which makes it very easy to get services covered by insurance. If you do not have a diagnosis it can be tricky and you will likely pay
out of pocket.
The Language Experience is good for speech and National Speech is good too

Great OT and PT at Early Intervention Assoc in Rockville

It doesn't hurt to overlap and do private mixed in with the MCITP...however, remember that you don't want to burn your child out on therapy. Especially true if you are looking at issues that will require your child to be in therapy for many years to come.

[Anonymous]

I'm grateful for this post because it let me know that I'm not alone in my mixed feelings about MoCo EI services. My DD is 24 mos and has no words and hasn't been getting any speech therapy other than SPIN pre-speech/engagement stuff. And our PT comes frequently but only really observes my DD or works on things my DD can already do with ease, like getting down from a chair. Because of this post, I'm gonna try private services and I may kick MoCo to the curb.

[Anonymous]

We stayed with our private speech therapist (TLC in Rockville) because DD was making progress there by the time we went through the EI hoopla to get started. The Hanen program was great and the OT we got from EI was great but I am so glad we didn't depend on them for speech. DD's language problems are fairly quirky (e.g. expressive language is way better than receptive) and the county is limited in what they can work on. For example, I brought up a concern about her learning color words. The Hanen teacher's response was something like they aren't supposed to be able to point to blue before age 4 and so wasn't something they could discuss with me. The private therapist was able to explore my concern that she was able to use days of the week in context but couldn't match a blue chip with a blue cup. (She has since overcome the color dysnomia but it was an early clue to other processing problems.)

That said, I'm glad I glad she has the EI file as background material for the work we are doing now for the IEP process.