Early childhood program returns to DD Board

YOUNGSTOWN

The administration of the Help Me Grow early childhood education program serving developmentally disabled children under age 3 will switch July 1 from the Mahoning County Educational Service Center to the county board of developmental disabilities.

“Our board has committed resources to providing this valuable service to children, 0 to age 3, and their families in the hopes that early intervention can help children catch up with those developmental delays and set them on a course for a better path of life,” Bill Whitacre, county DD board superintendent, recently told the county commissioners.

The program staff will be housed at the DD Board’s Leonard Kirtz School in Austintown, but will visit the children in the familiar environments of their homes and day care centers, Whitacre said.

“If you bring a child to a center like Leonard Kirtz and you teach them a routine, that’s not the environment where that routine will take place,” he told the commissioners.

“The toys that the children have available on a day-to-day basis [at home], that’s what they can interact with and manipulate,” he said, adding that toys available at the Kirtz School may not be present in the child’s home.

Whitacre said program staff, however, “may do a routine-based session at a restaurant, teaching a child how you behave in a restaurant and how you interact with other individuals.”

“All of the evidence and the research says that those services should be provided in natural environments,” Whitacre said.

The DD board is resuming administration of this program after 10 years without it; and the local DD board recently was one of only a few in the state not offering this service, Whitacre said.