The South East Early Intervention Program is offered by Utah State University. Castle Country Radio was able to sit down with Early Intervention Clinical Supervisor, Tammy Allred and Early Intervention Specialist, Janel Boyer to talk about their services.
“The South East Early Intervention Program is actually one of 15 Early Intervention Programs in the State of Utah. We operate under the Utah Department of Health Baby Watch Early Intervention Program. We serve infants and toddlers who have developmental delays, disabilities, or health concerns,” stated Allred. They offer a variety of services to their clients with the help from developmental specialists like speech/language pathologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses.
They pride themselves in helping infants and toddlers reach their developmental milestones and are proud to serve the Carbon, Emery and Grand Counties. “We know that all babies and children develop specific milestones in a specific order and there is a wide range of when those immerge. However, you can go to our website at https://utseeip.com/ and we do have a list of developmental milestones that their children should be achieving at certain ages,” said Allred. The developmental checklist starts at four months and goes up to 36 months. It shows where your child should be at each age in cognitive learning, social/emotional, gross motor, fine motor and communication skills.
“Well children can qualify for our program either by a specific medical diagnosis that is identified by the state’s Baby Watch program. So they can qualify automatically by diagnosis. They can also qualify by the standard scores on assessments that we do,” said Allred. Anyone who is in need of their services can contact them as they do free assessments on children.
“Our program is based on a sliding scale,” Boyer explains, “The evaluation itself is completely free regardless of income. A child is automatically no fee if they are on programs such as Medicaid, WIC, CHIP, Early Head Start.” For all other families, service cost is on a sliding fee scale based on the family’s monthly income.
“We are a home-based program so services come to the families in their home. Currently, with COVID we are not able to come in and out of people’s homes so we are providing services virtually. Which actually works really well because we are a coaching model program where we are educating and coaching families on how they can provide interventions with their child instead of a therapy approach where they work directly with us,” said Allred. The organization has found during these COVID times that they are able to reach out to more families virtually then they would otherwise.
To learn more about South East Early Intervention Program visit their website or call them at (435) 637-3950