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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.
“The parents were very upset about that, but, thank God, we got it back,” replied Commissioner Carol Rimedio-Righetti.
The return of the program to the DD Board means that board will provide services to people of all ages, who have developmental disabilities, said Paul Iden, the board’s communications and development coordinator.
Jennifer Bionci, executive director of the Northeast Branch of ARC of Ohio, the advocacy group for parents of developmentally disabled children, said she has heard no complaints from parents about ESC’s administration of the program.
She said, however, some parents have told her they believe the return of the early-childhood program to the DD Board will improve continuity of service to this population.
“We’re working hand-in-hand for the transition,” Iden said of the ESC and the DD Board.