Samantha's Appointment

We finished with Samantha's intake appointment. We filled out all of the paperwork and picked some developmental & speech therapists. They will be contacting the ones that I chose and one from each category will be coming to evaluate Samantha. If she has at least a 30% delay, she will be eligible to receive services.

The service coordinator (that's what I was trying to come up with in the previous post) explained the process which is as follows:

1. Referral -- Call made to EI by the parent, physician, etc.
2. Assignment to a Service Coordinator (SC)
3. Intake Appointment -- SC comes to child's home to gather all needed info & explain the process to the parent(s)/guardian(s). P/G selects therapists to evaluate their child in the areas that delays are suspected.
4. Evaluations
5. Reports from eval. sent to SC
6. SC reviews reports and determines if services are needed.
7. SC lets p/g know the results of the eval. & whether or not child qualifies for services.
8. A IFSP meeting is done to determine what the goals are for the child's therapy. (This is very similar to the IEP we do each year for Jay's Special Ed. & Speech services at school.)
9. Therapist(s) begin to see the child.
10. Case review every 6-12 months.

I believe I got all steps in there. She also explained that there is a Family Fee that would need to be paid to help cover what insurance does not cover. I know that our insurance does not cover speech services, so I figured that we would have a large payment to make each month. Well I was wrong. The fee is based on your income. The monthly fees are $0, $10, $20, $30, $50, $70, $100, $150 & $200. It does say that families who are on Medicaid, KidCare or WIC, or whose income is at or below 185% of the federal poverty level are not required to pay a fee. Considering that the maximum monthly family fee for a family of 5 is for those whose income is over $144, 780 per year.

I am hoping that we can get the evaluations done next week. I would like to get things going before school starts. I will definitely post again once we have acheived the next step in the process.