Early Intervention is Key! - By Ashley Scott

My greatest success with Early Childhood Education and Care services has been Early Intervention. Head Start and their resources have helped our son with where he needed to be, and beyond. The staff was amazing and helped us even through the pandemic by giving us materials so he wouldn’t take a step backwards and would keep going forward.

My son loved the program. Teachers do make differences in these kids’ lives because there’s no telling where my son would be if we didn’t have this program in the community. My son has moderate autism, sensory processing disorder, and ADHD. Now, his baby sister is in Early Head Start and thriving because she has a 50/50 chance of being autistic, which we can’t tell until she gets older. With the Early Intervention program in Metropolis, my son started crawling and walking by 16-18 months and now my daughter is crawling at 10 months. She is seeing other kids close to her crawling or walking around.

We need programs like these everywhere. I get teary-eyed talking about it because my son also was in early childhood at another school, so he was doing half day at Head Start and half in the early childhood program to get his Speech and Occupational Therapy services. All I have is positivity for what these programs can do to help our children.

I would like more Occupational Therapy services available outside of the school district in order for my son to receive his therapy from home or outside of school hours.