Guest post by Lauren Rangel, TCDD Public Policy Fellow at Easterseals Central Texas.
The Texas Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) program serves over 60,000 infants and toddlers under the age of three who have developmental disabilities or delays. Children in the program get valuable services like speech therapy and physical therapy. Their parents also receive coaching support to ensure that they can continue implementing strategies that support their children in achieving individualized developmental goals outside of service hours.
In the face of uncertainty, ECI providers across the state have adopted innovative practices like remote evaluations for referred children. They now also provide services via telehealth to ensure that as many Texas infants and toddlers receive the services that they need to grow and thrive in this time of crisis.
However, providers are deeply concerned about the toddlers turning three during COVID-19. Unfortunately, Texas ECI providers do not serve families once their children turn three years old. Typically, these children and families then transition to receive supportive services through school districts. However, due to school closures, many children have been waiting since March for evaluations and services from school districts. Many large school districts have been slow to resume evaluating these children despite guidance from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) prioritizing renewed evaluations for transition-aged toddlers.
As Steven Aleman of Disability Rights Texas notes, “Some school districts are not evaluating, so these children are not getting any plan or services from school. These three-year-olds are languishing.”
Unfortunately, time is of the essence for transition-aged toddlers. As the early years of life are the most critical to child development, it is critical that children receive consistent services to support their needs. For many children with disabilities and delays, gaps in services may result in tremendous loss of skills known as regression. If left unaddressed, delayed service delivery could change the trajectory of these children’s developmental progress. As time passes, ECI providers are increasingly concerned about the long-term implications of such delays.
Jennifer Yang of Easterseals Central Texas explains, “As the months go by without evaluations, the list of children needing to be evaluated grows, which will further delay these children from getting the services they need even once the district has returned to normal business operations. With the current COVID-19 spike we are seeing in Central Texas, we are growing more and more worried that these children will be waiting many months without services."
Linda Litzinger of Texas Parent to Parent notes the tragedy of this circumstance. “These families are doing everything right,” she said. “They are getting their child served early and then this happens. This has to change.”
It is critical that these children receive services not only because it will help them to become school-ready, but also because they are legally entitled to them. As school districts have not received flexibility in meeting both federal and state-regulated timelines for evaluating and serving these children, a widespread failure of districts to do so timely could result in yet another investigation of the State by the federal Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
COVID-19 has presented school districts with unique and difficult challenges, but continuing to serve these children must be prioritized. It will require school districts to emulate and collaborate with ECI providers in the provision of evaluations during this unprecedented time. TEA could support these efforts by issuing additional guidance stressing the importance of these continued evaluations and identifying the consequences of the failure of districts to put forth reasonable efforts to serve these toddlers. Local Education Agencies (LEAs) would also need to support districts by providing guidance and resources to pursue virtual or hybrid evaluations. As many Texas children have already aged out of ECI without transitioning to district services, this issue requires immediate and swift action.
For Guadalupe, a parent whose three-year-old son is awaiting an evaluation, services could not come soon enough. “I just want him to get what he needs,” she said. “I want everything for him."
Easterseals Central Texas is one of the state’s ECI contractors. You can reach Lauren at [email protected].