What the 3-year-old West Chicago toddler can’t do yet is speak more than a few words. His balance is wobbly and he isn’t able to let his preschool teachers know when he’s hurt or scared.
But providers are scarce in almost all states. Some children wait months or years for the care they need, and many age out of the program before they access any services at all. When children turn 3, the responsibility for providing special education services shifts from Early Intervention to school districts. But those systems are understaffed and booked up, too, according to speech-language pathologist Sarah Ziemba, an Early Intervention provider in Peoria, Illinois.
“For Black children, the disparities in access to services are especially large and cannot plausibly be explained by differences in need,” the report says.“Poorer states are serving a lower percentage of children, so really suggesting that there is a problem there,” Friedman-Krauss said. “In the long term, we’re seeing kids fall farther and farther behind,” said Ziemba, who has done this work for nearly 25 years.
The impact therapy can have is palpable. Lindsey Faulkner, a mother of four living in Peoria, got in-person speech therapy sessions for her 2-year-old daughter, Aria, within a month of her referral. She raves about the difference she has seen in her child after a year of working with therapist Megan Sanders.Early on in their sessions, Aria zoomed around the room. Now, Aria can sit and engage with Sanders for most of the session.
Early Intervention providers and service coordinators, who connect families with therapists, are woefully underpaid, according to Darcy Armbruster, a physical therapist who serves DuPage County near Chicago and has worked in the Early Intervention program for 11 years. Garcia tried to do the exercises with her toddler herself, but it never seemed to work. Finally, they were able to secure an in-person appointment through a private provider. They never made it off the Early Intervention waitlist.“His lips were not able to move the way they should so that speech can come out," Garcia said.
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