Transitions

Early childhood transition is the process of change within or between services that involves children, families, other caregivers, and service providers. Families and children go through many transitions, big and small. The transition from receiving early intervention services to whatever comes next happens on the child’s 3rd birthday. To support that process, the ECC has developed a series of handouts for early intervention providers adapted from the framework used in the Indiana Department of Education’s Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit.

For further guidance around supporting families to transition with confidence from early intervention services, contact the ECC at eccenter@iu.edu.

Transition Resources

Collaboration

Transition Meeting Questions

Life After First Steps: Different Paths for Different Families by Katie Herron, Ph.D.

Description of the video:

Hello. Today we're going to be talking about life after First Steps, different paths for different families. So essentially, we're going to be talking about transition, but maybe in a slightly different way than what you're used to. My name is Dr. Katie Herron. I am the Director of the Early Childhood Center at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community down in Bloomington on the IU campus. We are one of seven Centers that are part of the Institute that focus on taking research and translating them into best practices in the real world. And we attempt to cover the lifespan. We try to look at the whole child from early childhood all the way through school and into adulthood. So let's talk about our session outcomes for today. Here's what we want to have happen. We hope that you'll walk away from this webinar having maybe a better understanding about options after First Steps. A lot of you may be Service Coordinators. You may know the options. Maybe the better outcome here is to say that you'll have a different perspective on how to share those outcomes. Hopefully, you'll know where to find more information about options after First Steps. Again, you may have that down pat and it may be more about how are you presenting that information to families. And hopefully, you'll understand the importance of making decisions and supporting your families to make decisions that align with long-term hopes and dreams. Because I think that is something that is sometimes a gap where we're just, we get busy and we're focused on getting things done and the things checked off our list. And we sometimes forget about connecting the things that parents have to decide with where they're trying to go in the future. So we'll talk about that. So, again, if you are a professional in the First Steps system, what you might sometimes feel like transition is, is a movement from the part C First Steps Early Intervention System into the part B School Developmental Preschool System, right? And you know there's other options. We know there's other options. But realistically, a lot of your paperwork, a lot of the alignment that has been done between systems has been between those two systems. And a lot of the things that you're responsible for, timeline wise, involve how you move a family from First Steps into the Public Preschool System, at least for an evaluation. What today's presentation is going to walk through is all of the other options. Well, maybe not all. There's lots of options and lots of combinations of options. But it's going to walk you through what are some of the other options and how we might talk about those with families. Because it's important to remember that we're not making the choice. We're supporting the family, to be aware of what's out there and make the choice that's going to work for their child and their family. All right. So, let's run through this list. First one is Public Preschool. This is the one that you are probably most familiar with and that many of your kids go into. If you want to click on the link, you can go into the DOE website and you can find a nice parent graphic of the special education process, which can be very helpful. So what I have here is just walking folks through. Now, again, you're probably very familiar with this, but I want to give a sense that even within the Public Preschool System, there are then choices that families have to make about how they're going to use those services. So when we refer a family to the school for an evaluation, we know that evaluation has to be completed and the IEP meeting has to be held. And there are rules about when that happens. But what happens in terms of services that are being offered at that meeting? There are choices, and often decisions that families have to make. Because as we know, Special Education is not a place or a location. Special Education are services. So it could look like services in a standard preschool setting. So in other words, a typical preschool that any child would be available to go to and that a typical kiddo could go to as well. There could be services in a Developmental Preschool. And I would venture to say that that's probably a common option that you may have experienced with families. Developmental Preschools can run the gamut. Some of them are inclusive. So they include typical peers, many are not. Many are what we would call segregated, so they are just kiddos with disabilities. And then there can be various options in between. And then families may also choose standalone services. They may choose to receive OT or PT or Speech, but not to receive those in the context of a preschool environment. Okay, so that's public preschool. Again, you're probably quite familiar with that. Let's talk about another option, Head Start. So Head Start you can find - here is the map where you can find the locations near you. Again, if you are a Service Coordinator in the system, I imagine you're familiar with that map and you're familiar with the Head Starts that provide services in your area. Things to think about with families and help them think through are how these different options, what they offer and what they require. Head Start is an inclusive setting. So if they're being offered Developmental Preschool in the Public School setting, Headstart could be an option for an inclusive setting where the child is with typical peers and receives services, well some supports from Head Start in that setting. And then can still receive services from the public school, either separately or on a consultation basis. We know that 10% of students must have a disability in Head Start Programs. So if you have a family that is above the income cutoff for Head Start, but you still think might be a good fit for Head Start, you can still have them reach out, because what I've heard from Head Start folks is that it really just depends. It depends on the program, it depends on what year it is. Some programs are having trouble filling up. And so if the kiddo has a disability, even if they don't meet income guidelines, they will still have a place in Head Start. Sometimes some Head Start programs will fill up all the way, including kids with disabilities, all with families that meet the income criteria. And then you have a family that's over the criteria that wouldn't be eligible. But it just depends. And so it's worth reaching out and at least sharing the option with families or getting a sense of how your program works in your area. The income guidelines in general are below the federal poverty level, so family of four, that's around $30,000 or below. But again, you just need to check to make sure if there are dispensations around that disability piece. And Head Start has a Disability Services Coordinator, which can be a very helpful role when you have a kiddo with a disability coming into an inclusive setting to have them think through what those extra needs are and extra supports may be. Okay. So we've talked about Public Preschool and the different ways that that can look. We've talked about Head Start. Let's talk about a Community Preschool, that's always on the table. Right? Okay. So Community Preschools can look a few different ways. They can be Ministries. So they could be a church preschool. Sometimes if a family has older siblings or cousins or neighbors, or have lots of other kiddos in their lives, those kiddos may have gone to typical Community Preschools and they may want to consider those options for their child with a disability as well. Could look like a Private preschool, Center-based preschool. When we think about these Private preschools, we need to help families consider you know, what are the inclusion scenarios. Generally, Community Preschools are inclusive settings in the sense that they have typical peers. Now, some Community Preschools are more open and accepting of how to think outside the box to accept a child with a disability. There are ADA requirements, well, not for Ministries, but for Private Preschools around accepting children with disabilities into Childcares, as well as private preschools. And those things are important to understand as well. I have a link here to a nice resource that's kind of like a Q and A around childcare and the ADA, because I think often families will, not often, but yeah, kind of often to be honest, families will get information that isn't always accurate around inclusion and what Childcares are required to do and what they aren't. So, this is a good resource for that. On My Way Pre-K is a thing in Indiana. I'm sure you're aware of it. I've got the link here if you need more information. On My Way Pre-K is for families with income below 150% of the federal poverty level. So it's a little bit higher than the Head Start cutoff, approximately $45,000 for a family of four. So, if you have a family that isn't qualifying for Head Start, but might still qualify for On My Way Pre-K, this is definitely something you should check out. There is a requirement that parents or the guardians need to either be working, going to school, or attempting to work, so attending job training, or searching for a job. And the child needs to be turning four by August 1 of the current school year and be planning to start kindergarten the next school year. So it's not available if they are just turning three , On My Way Pre-K would probably not be the choice for them. Okay. So we've got public preschool, we've got Head Start, we've got Community Preschool. Let's talk a little bit about ABA. ABA is an interesting option because I'll say that even 5, 10 years ago, it wasn't something you heard a ton about. I mean it existed, ABA has been around for a long time, but as a mainstream option for children coming out of First Steps instead of preschool, This is a new phenomenon. It is considered an evidence-based practice. Research has shown that there's efficacy for children with ASD, around socialization, communication, and expressive language. So, that's the first thing to know. ABA does not tend to be inclusive. ABA is generally one- on-one. Sometimes there have been modifications to ABA that get away from that a little bit. But generally, ABA is one-on-one, it's an adult and child. So it's not focused on including children with typical peers. And then I think it's important to understand why some people like it and some people don't, because it's something that families have to grapple with. And you as a professional should be aware of this as well. Early versions of ABA were pretty tough sometimes, they could be punitive. They focused on negative consequences. That has, for the most part, changed quite a bit. But there's that early stuff that's there and it colors a lot of the ways that adults with autism look and think about ABA. They used to use deterrence, as I said, negative consequences rather than focusing on positive reinforcement, which is much more common now. The focus is on eliminating behaviors instead of skill building. And that too, sometimes I think has shifted, but it certainly, they're trying to decrease things that are problematic. And that can be fine if you've got a child who's challenging behavior is keeping them out of other settings or causing a lot of distress for the family and the caregivers. But it's important to work on the skill building as well. One of the bigger issues, the more philosophical issues, if you will, for families to think about and work out, is how much is ABA just trying to force kiddos that are not neurotypical to look and sound neurotypical. So sometimes the things that they focus on around eye contact, or the way that speech is used may feel like we're just trying to train the autism out of them. There's a whole community of adults that has really seen the value in thinking differently and have taken autism as part of their identity. So there are some great articles on the Indiana Resource Center on Autism, the IRCA, which is another Center here at the IIDC. They've done a whole bunch of articles around ABA , so if you're interested in more about what it is or what it looks like or things to think about. There are so many Centers now in Indiana compared to the way that it used to be. And there's no regulation, which means that you can have some fantastic things happening and you can have some not so fantastic things happening. And it's really important for families to understand that when they're considering this as one of their options. The biggest thing that I say is ask questions. And I believe there's an article on the IRCA page that lists some questions that families can ask as they're going around and looking at ABA sites to make sure that they find a site that is doing things well and is going to work for that family. Okay, so we've got Public Preschool. We've got Head Start. We've got community options. We've got ABA as an option. Let's talk about what else is in the community. There's Community Preschool options, but there are also just Community options. Some families are not ready to send their child to preschool or don't prioritize that. So they might do home school instead, and focus on that. They might do library story time, they might take their kiddos to the park. Play times, playgroups, Community Centers. There are all kinds of ways for children to go out into the community that are not your traditional preschool options. All of these tend to be inclusive, and can be great ways for kiddos to get socialization and communication experience. As well as for families to get out and see other families and have that rich interaction as well. There are segregated community options, so things like private therapy or special needs events or playgroups. Sometimes Therapy Centers also have groups that they offer and social and play times and things like that. So it's important for families to understand the difference between inclusive options and segregated options as they think about what's going to work best for them. So the reality is that I've shown you all these doorways, but really it's going to be a mixture, right? It doesn't have to just be one thing. It can be this type of preschool in the morning and then therapy in the afternoon. Or it can be we're going to go do the Developmental Preschool in the morning, but then we're going to do park and library in the afternoon. There's all different ways to make this work depending on what the family needs. I mean, it's not just what they want, but it's also transportation, and work schedules, and the reality of day-to-day life. What's important is that they've looked at all of these options and kind of considered what are the pros and cons. Because not only is it important for us not to make choices for them, because we think, ah, well, okay, this family, with their income and their capacity, we're going to have to just send them to the Developmental Preschool with that school bus. That's really the only thing that's going to work. Even if that's true, it's not our decision to make. Not only are we overstepping by doing that, but the more important thing is that we are trying during the course of the family's time in First Steps to empower them to go on to be able to make decisions down the road when we're not there. I mean again, if you think about this lifespan perspective, they're going to be with that child the whole life, right? Even as that child gets older and starts to make decisions for themselves, the family is going to be providing support. They need to feel confident in the decisions that they're making. And this is a wonderful opportunity for them to think about the options, problem solve for their family, with you as a support and a scaffold. Okay, so how does a family choose? I did this presentation for mainly a family audience I have. How do you choose? But you're not choosing. You're going to be sharing with families, right? So how do families choose? One of the things we say is talk to other families. We also suggest that they talk to their providers, you as a Service Coordinator and also their ongoing providers. We suggest that they decide with the end in mind, which is somewhat novel. I'm not sure that they get a lot of practice doing that, but we're going to talk about that then. And then we're going to emphasize that it's important for families to be educated about what inclusion is, so that they can make decisions about how important that is and when they want to look for it. So let's start with talking to other families. Parents need role models. They need to see what's possible. And it's very important for them to have that opportunity. So, when my son was born, he's 22 now, so he's an adult. But when he was born, all we heard was the things he wouldn't be able to do and the concerns from medical folks. So our initial expectations were not high. They may have stayed that way if it wasn't for the Internet. I did a lot of googling and I found a group that had a similar genetic condition. So folks with similar genetic conditions were getting together and talking. And I posted our story, and a week later I got a video in the mail. The video was from a mom out in California who had an older child with the same disability. And it showed that kiddo with short arms swimming and playing and riding an adapted skateboard and stealing chocolate when his mom wasn't looking at all the things that I had wondered if my kiddo would ever do. And just seeing that from a child a little bit farther down the line was enough for me to adjust my ideas about what might happen. So I think it's very important for us to be aware, as professionals, of how we can connect families to other families. Some of them are connected already. They have had the capacity to go out and find that information and that's great, that's fantastic. Some of them, this is brand spanking new. And they have not had the capacity. They're either in exhausted survival mode, or they're feeling some of that grief and denial. Or they just don't know how to search for something like that, new information like that. So we've got Indiana Family to Family which they have consolidated. It used to be Family Voices and Ask About Special Kids. They have consolidated into Indiana Family to Family and they're a wonderful resource. INSource is a wonderful resource and you might think, oh well that's just if they're having problems when they get into the special education world. But in fact, INSource is a great resource for families in early intervention as well, and a way to connect with other families. We've got regional groups over in the Greenfield, East Indianapolis area. There's FUSE, which is a parent-run support network and there's a lot of online groups as well that can be very specialized, which, which is lovely. We want them to talk with families and if we can facilitate some of that connecting when they're ready, that's fantastic. And remember they may not be ready the first time you ask them. And that doesn't mean it was a bad idea, it just means they might not have been ready the first time you asked them. So try to loop that in all of the times, right? Just not to be a broken record, but just because six months or a year after the first time you asked, they're probably in a very different place. The other thing we want them to do is talk to providers. You may be a Service Coordinator and we hope they'll talk to you. But the folks that they're in their home every week, the Physical Therapist, the Speech Therapist, whoever it may be, we want them to ask those questions as well. We do want to remind that families though, that providers are mostly speaking from their own experience. They have a lot of experience and it's very valuable. But it's different depending on the provider and their background. Providers haven't generally been trained in all of the options and in the research around the options. So families are getting perspectives when they ask providers for their opinions. So, it's a good way to gather information to contribute to a decision. But we wouldn't want them to think that the provider is the end-all be-all. And of course the provider doesn't know the family as well as the family does. So let's talk about deciding with the end in mind. This is something that I think is very important and a little bit novel sometimes to people in early intervention because we get so focused on our zero to three and the fact that this is what we do, we do early intervention. I think what's important for providers, Service Coordinators to remember is that it is good and healthy for families to hope and dream. Hoping and dreaming extends beyond age three. Most of us, if you are a parent, when we have our baby if we carried it in our body, then even before that baby was born or even if when we dreamed about being a parent, even if we're an adoptive parent, or foster parent, we had ideas about what our child might achieve, what they might experience in their life. And it might be as broad as that they're going to get married and have their own kids or be happy and contribute to the world. Or it might be specific, like I know they're going to go to college and grad school because I never got to or whatever it is. We all have these ideas, right? And it's very important for families of children with disabilities not to lose that. Because sometimes when we ask families to think about, "What do you want for your child in a year, in five years, as an adult?" Sometimes families have a hard time asking because people stop asking them to think about that and they're a little afraid to because life has changed a lot. And who knows if it'll change more? So it's important for us to support them in that long-term thinking. And here's why. When we ask families what they want in the future, they can answer us. When we let them think about that, here are all the things that they say. The bigger words are the words that they say more. We see independently, we say hope, we say happy. We see adults, college, friends, school, job, all of these things that families are thinking about and able to talk about. But generally don't get asked. So when we introduce the life course into First Steps. And some of you may have heard about the life course. We've been talking about it for a while at conferences. And some Service Coordinators have gone through some initial training around the life course. All it's saying is that, hey, all of these systems that we have, they all tie together. Early intervention, yeah, we're focused on zero to three, but it goes right seamlessly, hopefully into part B where we're school age, and then it goes right into Voc rehab or all the other programs that come with adulthood. And while we only stay in this one area, a child, they go all the way through from one to the other. It's helpful for families and children to think about that as a full lifespan experience rather than, okay, this one thing is now ending and now I'm in this completely different thing. And it's very important for families to be able to think about, "What do I want at the end of this, where am I heading?" And sometimes for families who haven't thought about it very much, it helps to think about what they don't want. So for example, this family, this is an example, said that what they don't want is - says, "I'm scared he'll always need a lot of help and he'll be lonely and I won't always be there." So they're talking about who will help that child if they're not there. What if he's lonely? We translate that into what do they hope for? Well, they want him to have friends. They want him to be as independent as possible. Okay, great. Now as we make decisions, including the very early decision of where do we go after First Steps, we want to be thinking about that, so that when we transition to preschool, what do you choose? Well, if your focus eventually is on social relationships is on independence, then which of those options is going to give him the best chance to practice some of those things? That's the idea of thinking with the end in mind. Let's talk a little bit about inclusion. What we know about inclusion is first that not everyone is clear on what it is. Here are a bunch of different pictures, you can see exclusion is where the dots that are different are just kept out of the circle. If we think of the circle as being a classroom, preschool classroom, some kind of a community setting, kiddos who are different just aren't invited in. Then we talk about segregation. Segregation is where there's a typical preschool classroom, but there's another classroom that is offered for kids with disabilities. That whole maybe separate but equal philosophy. If you think back to different types of segregation where yes, we'll provide you with some learning, but it's going to be separate from those "typical" children. Typical in quotes, because we know that everybody learns differently, not just kids with disabilities. Then we talk about integration. When we integrate, usually what that looks like is the kids who are different are brought into the same physical location as the typical kids, but there's not a whole lot of thought to how they're then going to be successful and successful in that setting. You can see they're all clustered together perhaps with an aide or an extra teacher, and they're not really brought into the classroom in the same way as the typical peers are. What we're going for, obviously, where we want to be is inclusion, right? Where the kids with disabilities, the kids without disabilities, they're all mixed together. They're getting what they need. Everybody has strengths, everybody has challenges. And it's all working in one space. That's the visual. I like this definition. Diversity Kids says, "Inclusion is looking for ways to maximize every child's sense of belonging and participation." Belonging is a really important word, I think, to keep in your forefront when you're thinking about inclusion. It's not just about what place we're going to put this child in or what services they're going to get, but it's how do we help them to feel that they belong. I want to share very briefly some of the research that was done recently at another one of the Centers that is at this Institute. Because I think it's powerful. It was not done in early childhood. And I'm sharing that for a reason. Because remember, we are thinking with the end in mind, so as we move from early childhood into school age into adulthood, We need to understand the trajectory of where we're going. The research, even though this is research in school age and high school is still very relevant because our kiddos are going to get there. What we found is that they looked at kiddos who are placed in high inclusion settings, which was 80% of the time in an inclusive setting, or low inclusion settings which was less than 80% of the time in an inclusive setting. What were their outcomes? What were the results? What they found for three through eight was that students with placements classified as high inclusion scored better on English language learning and math across the board. They also found for high school students that students that were placed in high inclusion settings scored significantly better on the tenth grade ELA English and Math IStep tests. They also found that students in high inclusion settings were more likely to graduate with a Core 40 or general diploma. And students in low inclusion settings were more likely to graduate with a waiver. Some of you may be thinking, okay, well so clearly our high-functioning kids were in the high inclusion settings and our low functioning kids were in the low inclusion settings. Of course, we don't like those terms, high functioning, low functioning. But as an example, maybe you're thinking that. This study actually held functioning study. It made sure that it basically took out the factor of how the children were functioning going in and it looked to see what the outcomes were at the end. These are kiddos that were not significantly different, but they were significantly different after they had either the inclusion or low inclusion experience. The other thing I want to emphasize is that these are not perfect inclusive settings. They didn't go in and try to teach perfect inclusion before they did the study. They just took inclusion for what it was. If the student was included in the classroom that counted as high inclusion or not. They may not have been perfectly doing all of the practices that we would say would be great, inclusive practices. And yet, we still see this very robust finding. We see that across the board, kiddos are doing better. Here's the English language results. Here's what we see, that beyond the academics, I told you about English, I told you about math. But they're also less likely to receive a disciplinary referral. They're more likely to belong to a school group, then after school, these last 2 bars. They're more likely to have competitive employment and they're more likely to live independently, which were two of the things, remember "jobs" and "independently" that showed up on that word cloud when we talked to families. Those are very important things for families. Here's a quote from Michael Giangreco from the University of Vermont. He says, "For every student who remains educationally segregated, there are other students with similar attributes, abilities, and needs who are successfully included. This simple fact suggests that whether a student with a disability is meaningfully included may have less to do with their characteristics and more to do with the attitudes, skills, structure, and practices of the adults responsible for providing education." Again, like I said, those kiddos were starting in the same spot. Whether they were put into inclusion or non-inclusive settings, often didn't have a whole lot to do with them. It was more what the school was prepared to do. The trap or the thing we're trying to avoid in early childhood is, well, it's represented by this quote. I'll read you the quote first. "Our findings with respect to placement patterns across the transition to the early elementary period are consistent with the hypothesis that initial placement in a full-inclusion program during the early childhood years creates a momentum, that results in continuing extensive involvement with children who are developing typically." That is a quote that essentially tells you this, hold on, there we go. The quote says this, "When parents are given many options, they are more likely to choose the more inclusive option." If they have the choice, most parents are going to go inclusive. When we segregate children and show parents that they need special places for their children to learn, parents lower their expectations regardless of functioning, and they're less likely to be able to be put into an inclusive setting later. I share that, I skipped ahead a little bit here. I share that because it's very important, I think, to acknowledge that where we start, where we build our momentum, that can last then through the lifespan. Early childhood isn't like, oh, well, it doesn't really matter what we do this year. We'll see what happens down the road. Only 1 in 3 preschoolers are educated with their typical peers, and it's important for us to consider why that might be. Okay, now, I shared that, and I want to stop before I summarize too fully and just say, I clearly think that inclusion is important. And I think that the research across the board backs that. Having said that, it is not my decision to make for anyone except for my own child, where they go to preschool or anywhere else. What's important is that families have the information, not that I'm pushing them to be an inclusive setting or pushing them to do one thing or another. There are a lot of options out there. There are a lot of people who can share their experiences and their perspectives to help families make good choices. They can talk to other families, they can talk to the professionals in their lives. Then they can decide what's going to work for them. I think inclusion is a good goal, but that doesn't really matter. Who am I? The bottom line is that family, they know their child, they know their family, and they're going to make the choice. That's the right choice. I will stop there. And this isn't live, so I'm not going to be able to take questions. But I do have my email here. I also have our social media for the Early Childhood Center, if you want to follow along. We do post and share information around inclusion and other early childhood topics. And you're more than welcome to email me if you do have a question about this presentation. So thank you for joining today. And hope you have a great afternoon.Hello. Today we're going to be talking about life after First Steps, different paths for different families. So essentially, we're going to be talking about transition, but maybe in a slightly different way than what you're used to. My name is Dr. Katie Herron. I am the Director of the Early Childhood Center at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community down in Bloomington on the IU campus. We are one of seven Centers that are part of the Institute that focus on taking research and translating them into best practices in the real world. And we attempt to cover the lifespan. We try to look at the whole child from early childhood all the way through school and into adulthood. So let's talk about our session outcomes for today. Here's what we want to have happen. We hope that you'll walk away from this webinar having maybe a better understanding about options after First Steps. A lot of you may be Service Coordinators. You may know the options. Maybe the better outcome here is to say that you'll have a different perspective on how to share those outcomes. Hopefully, you'll know where to find more information about options after First Steps. Again, you may have that down pat and it may be more about how are you presenting that information to families. And hopefully, you'll understand the importance of making decisions and supporting your families to make decisions that align with long-term hopes and dreams. Because I think that is something that is sometimes a gap where we're just, we get busy and we're focused on getting things done and the things checked off our list. And we sometimes forget about connecting the things that parents have to decide with where they're trying to go in the future. So we'll talk about that. So, again, if you are a professional in the First Steps system, what you might sometimes feel like transition is, is a movement from the part C First Steps Early Intervention System into the part B School Developmental Preschool System, right? And you know there's other options. We know there's other options. But realistically, a lot of your paperwork, a lot of the alignment that has been done between systems has been between those two systems. And a lot of the things that you're responsible for, timeline wise, involve how you move a family from First Steps into the Public Preschool System, at least for an evaluation. What today's presentation is going to walk through is all of the other options. Well, maybe not all. There's lots of options and lots of combinations of options. But it's going to walk you through what are some of the other options and how we might talk about those with families. Because it's important to remember that we're not making the choice. We're supporting the family, to be aware of what's out there and make the choice that's going to work for their child and their family. All right. So, let's run through this list. First one is Public Preschool. This is the one that you are probably most familiar with and that many of your kids go into. If you want to click on the link, you can go into the DOE website and you can find a nice parent graphic of the special education process, which can be very helpful. So what I have here is just walking folks through. Now, again, you're probably very familiar with this, but I want to give a sense that even within the Public Preschool System, there are then choices that families have to make about how they're going to use those services. So when we refer a family to the school for an evaluation, we know that evaluation has to be completed and the IEP meeting has to be held. And there are rules about when that happens. But what happens in terms of services that are being offered at that meeting? There are choices, and often decisions that families have to make. Because as we know, Special Education is not a place or a location. Special Education are services. So it could look like services in a standard preschool setting. So in other words, a typical preschool that any child would be available to go to and that a typical kiddo could go to as well. There could be services in a Developmental Preschool. And I would venture to say that that's probably a common option that you may have experienced with families. Developmental Preschools can run the gamut. Some of them are inclusive. So they include typical peers, many are not. Many are what we would call segregated, so they are just kiddos with disabilities. And then there can be various options in between. And then families may also choose standalone services. They may choose to receive OT or PT or Speech, but not to receive those in the context of a preschool environment. Okay, so that's public preschool. Again, you're probably quite familiar with that. Let's talk about another option, Head Start. So Head Start you can find - here is the map where you can find the locations near you. Again, if you are a Service Coordinator in the system, I imagine you're familiar with that map and you're familiar with the Head Starts that provide services in your area. Things to think about with families and help them think through are how these different options, what they offer and what they require. Head Start is an inclusive setting. So if they're being offered Developmental Preschool in the Public School setting, Headstart could be an option for an inclusive setting where the child is with typical peers and receives services, well some supports from Head Start in that setting. And then can still receive services from the public school, either separately or on a consultation basis. We know that 10% of students must have a disability in Head Start Programs. So if you have a family that is above the income cutoff for Head Start, but you still think might be a good fit for Head Start, you can still have them reach out, because what I've heard from Head Start folks is that it really just depends. It depends on the program, it depends on what year it is. Some programs are having trouble filling up. And so if the kiddo has a disability, even if they don't meet income guidelines, they will still have a place in Head Start. Sometimes some Head Start programs will fill up all the way, including kids with disabilities, all with families that meet the income criteria. And then you have a family that's over the criteria that wouldn't be eligible. But it just depends. And so it's worth reaching out and at least sharing the option with families or getting a sense of how your program works in your area. The income guidelines in general are below the federal poverty level, so family of four, that's around $30,000 or below. But again, you just need to check to make sure if there are dispensations around that disability piece. And Head Start has a Disability Services Coordinator, which can be a very helpful role when you have a kiddo with a disability coming into an inclusive setting to have them think through what those extra needs are and extra supports may be. Okay. So we've talked about Public Preschool and the different ways that that can look. We've talked about Head Start. Let's talk about a Community Preschool, that's always on the table. Right? Okay. So Community Preschools can look a few different ways. They can be Ministries. So they could be a church preschool. Sometimes if a family has older siblings or cousins or neighbors, or have lots of other kiddos in their lives, those kiddos may have gone to typical Community Preschools and they may want to consider those options for their child with a disability as well. Could look like a Private preschool, Center-based preschool. When we think about these Private preschools, we need to help families consider you know, what are the inclusion scenarios. Generally, Community Preschools are inclusive settings in the sense that they have typical peers. Now, some Community Preschools are more open and accepting of how to think outside the box to accept a child with a disability. There are ADA requirements, well, not for Ministries, but for Private Preschools around accepting children with disabilities into Childcares, as well as private preschools. And those things are important to understand as well. I have a link here to a nice resource that's kind of like a Q and A around childcare and the ADA, because I think often families will, not often, but yeah, kind of often to be honest, families will get information that isn't always accurate around inclusion and what Childcares are required to do and what they aren't. So, this is a good resource for that. On My Way Pre-K is a thing in Indiana. I'm sure you're aware of it. I've got the link here if you need more information. On My Way Pre-K is for families with income below 150% of the federal poverty level. So it's a little bit higher than the Head Start cutoff, approximately $45,000 for a family of four. So, if you have a family that isn't qualifying for Head Start, but might still qualify for On My Way Pre-K, this is definitely something you should check out. There is a requirement that parents or the guardians need to either be working, going to school, or attempting to work, so attending job training, or searching for a job. And the child needs to be turning four by August 1 of the current school year and be planning to start kindergarten the next school year. So it's not available if they are just turning three , On My Way Pre-K would probably not be the choice for them. Okay. So we've got public preschool, we've got Head Start, we've got Community Preschool. Let's talk a little bit about ABA. ABA is an interesting option because I'll say that even 5, 10 years ago, it wasn't something you heard a ton about. I mean it existed, ABA has been around for a long time, but as a mainstream option for children coming out of First Steps instead of preschool, This is a new phenomenon. It is considered an evidence-based practice. Research has shown that there's efficacy for children with ASD, around socialization, communication, and expressive language. So, that's the first thing to know. ABA does not tend to be inclusive. ABA is generally one- on-one. Sometimes there have been modifications to ABA that get away from that a little bit. But generally, ABA is one-on-one, it's an adult and child. So it's not focused on including children with typical peers. And then I think it's important to understand why some people like it and some people don't, because it's something that families have to grapple with. And you as a professional should be aware of this as well. Early versions of ABA were pretty tough sometimes, they could be punitive. They focused on negative consequences. That has, for the most part, changed quite a bit. But there's that early stuff that's there and it colors a lot of the ways that adults with autism look and think about ABA. They used to use deterrence, as I said, negative consequences rather than focusing on positive reinforcement, which is much more common now. The focus is on eliminating behaviors instead of skill building. And that too, sometimes I think has shifted, but it certainly, they're trying to decrease things that are problematic. And that can be fine if you've got a child who's challenging behavior is keeping them out of other settings or causing a lot of distress for the family and the caregivers. But it's important to work on the skill building as well. One of the bigger issues, the more philosophical issues, if you will, for families to think about and work out, is how much is ABA just trying to force kiddos that are not neurotypical to look and sound neurotypical. So sometimes the things that they focus on around eye contact, or the way that speech is used may feel like we're just trying to train the autism out of them. There's a whole community of adults that has really seen the value in thinking differently and have taken autism as part of their identity. So there are some great articles on the Indiana Resource Center on Autism, the IRCA, which is another Center here at the IIDC. They've done a whole bunch of articles around ABA , so if you're interested in more about what it is or what it looks like or things to think about. There are so many Centers now in Indiana compared to the way that it used to be. And there's no regulation, which means that you can have some fantastic things happening and you can have some not so fantastic things happening. And it's really important for families to understand that when they're considering this as one of their options. The biggest thing that I say is ask questions. And I believe there's an article on the IRCA page that lists some questions that families can ask as they're going around and looking at ABA sites to make sure that they find a site that is doing things well and is going to work for that family. Okay, so we've got Public Preschool. We've got Head Start. We've got community options. We've got ABA as an option. Let's talk about what else is in the community. There's Community Preschool options, but there are also just Community options. Some families are not ready to send their child to preschool or don't prioritize that. So they might do home school instead, and focus on that. They might do library story time, they might take their kiddos to the park. Play times, playgroups, Community Centers. There are all kinds of ways for children to go out into the community that are not your traditional preschool options. All of these tend to be inclusive, and can be great ways for kiddos to get socialization and communication experience. As well as for families to get out and see other families and have that rich interaction as well. There are segregated community options, so things like private therapy or special needs events or playgroups. Sometimes Therapy Centers also have groups that they offer and social and play times and things like that. So it's important for families to understand the difference between inclusive options and segregated options as they think about what's going to work best for them. So the reality is that I've shown you all these doorways, but really it's going to be a mixture, right? It doesn't have to just be one thing. It can be this type of preschool in the morning and then therapy in the afternoon. Or it can be we're going to go do the Developmental Preschool in the morning, but then we're going to do park and library in the afternoon. There's all different ways to make this work depending on what the family needs. I mean, it's not just what they want, but it's also transportation, and work schedules, and the reality of day-to-day life. What's important is that they've looked at all of these options and kind of considered what are the pros and cons. Because not only is it important for us not to make choices for them, because we think, ah, well, okay, this family, with their income and their capacity, we're going to have to just send them to the Developmental Preschool with that school bus. That's really the only thing that's going to work. Even if that's true, it's not our decision to make. Not only are we overstepping by doing that, but the more important thing is that we are trying during the course of the family's time in First Steps to empower them to go on to be able to make decisions down the road when we're not there. I mean again, if you think about this lifespan perspective, they're going to be with that child the whole life, right? Even as that child gets older and starts to make decisions for themselves, the family is going to be providing support. They need to feel confident in the decisions that they're making. And this is a wonderful opportunity for them to think about the options, problem solve for their family, with you as a support and a scaffold. Okay, so how does a family choose? I did this presentation for mainly a family audience I have. How do you choose? But you're not choosing. You're going to be sharing with families, right? So how do families choose? One of the things we say is talk to other families. We also suggest that they talk to their providers, you as a Service Coordinator and also their ongoing providers. We suggest that they decide with the end in mind, which is somewhat novel. I'm not sure that they get a lot of practice doing that, but we're going to talk about that then. And then we're going to emphasize that it's important for families to be educated about what inclusion is, so that they can make decisions about how important that is and when they want to look for it. So let's start with talking to other families. Parents need role models. They need to see what's possible. And it's very important for them to have that opportunity. So, when my son was born, he's 22 now, so he's an adult. But when he was born, all we heard was the things he wouldn't be able to do and the concerns from medical folks. So our initial expectations were not high. They may have stayed that way if it wasn't for the Internet. I did a lot of googling and I found a group that had a similar genetic condition. So folks with similar genetic conditions were getting together and talking. And I posted our story, and a week later I got a video in the mail. The video was from a mom out in California who had an older child with the same disability. And it showed that kiddo with short arms swimming and playing and riding an adapted skateboard and stealing chocolate when his mom wasn't looking at all the things that I had wondered if my kiddo would ever do. And just seeing that from a child a little bit farther down the line was enough for me to adjust my ideas about what might happen. So I think it's very important for us to be aware, as professionals, of how we can connect families to other families. Some of them are connected already. They have had the capacity to go out and find that information and that's great, that's fantastic. Some of them, this is brand spanking new. And they have not had the capacity. They're either in exhausted survival mode, or they're feeling some of that grief and denial. Or they just don't know how to search for something like that, new information like that. So we've got Indiana Family to Family which they have consolidated. It used to be Family Voices and Ask About Special Kids. They have consolidated into Indiana Family to Family and they're a wonderful resource. INSource is a wonderful resource and you might think, oh well that's just if they're having problems when they get into the special education world. But in fact, INSource is a great resource for families in early intervention as well, and a way to connect with other families. We've got regional groups over in the Greenfield, East Indianapolis area. There's FUSE, which is a parent-run support network and there's a lot of online groups as well that can be very specialized, which, which is lovely. We want them to talk with families and if we can facilitate some of that connecting when they're ready, that's fantastic. And remember they may not be ready the first time you ask them. And that doesn't mean it was a bad idea, it just means they might not have been ready the first time you asked them. So try to loop that in all of the times, right? Just not to be a broken record, but just because six months or a year after the first time you asked, they're probably in a very different place. The other thing we want them to do is talk to providers. You may be a Service Coordinator and we hope they'll talk to you. But the folks that they're in their home every week, the Physical Therapist, the Speech Therapist, whoever it may be, we want them to ask those questions as well. We do want to remind that families though, that providers are mostly speaking from their own experience. They have a lot of experience and it's very valuable. But it's different depending on the provider and their background. Providers haven't generally been trained in all of the options and in the research around the options. So families are getting perspectives when they ask providers for their opinions. So, it's a good way to gather information to contribute to a decision. But we wouldn't want them to think that the provider is the end-all be-all. And of course the provider doesn't know the family as well as the family does. So let's talk about deciding with the end in mind. This is something that I think is very important and a little bit novel sometimes to people in early intervention because we get so focused on our zero to three and the fact that this is what we do, we do early intervention. I think what's important for providers, Service Coordinators to remember is that it is good and healthy for families to hope and dream. Hoping and dreaming extends beyond age three. Most of us, if you are a parent, when we have our baby if we carried it in our body, then even before that baby was born or even if when we dreamed about being a parent, even if we're an adoptive parent, or foster parent, we had ideas about what our child might achieve, what they might experience in their life. And it might be as broad as that they're going to get married and have their own kids or be happy and contribute to the world. Or it might be specific, like I know they're going to go to college and grad school because I never got to or whatever it is. We all have these ideas, right? And it's very important for families of children with disabilities not to lose that. Because sometimes when we ask families to think about, "What do you want for your child in a year, in five years, as an adult?" Sometimes families have a hard time asking because people stop asking them to think about that and they're a little afraid to because life has changed a lot. And who knows if it'll change more? So it's important for us to support them in that long-term thinking. And here's why. When we ask families what they want in the future, they can answer us. When we let them think about that, here are all the things that they say. The bigger words are the words that they say more. We see independently, we say hope, we say happy. We see adults, college, friends, school, job, all of these things that families are thinking about and able to talk about. But generally don't get asked. So when we introduce the life course into First Steps. And some of you may have heard about the life course. We've been talking about it for a while at conferences. And some Service Coordinators have gone through some initial training around the life course. All it's saying is that, hey, all of these systems that we have, they all tie together. Early intervention, yeah, we're focused on zero to three, but it goes right seamlessly, hopefully into part B where we're school age, and then it goes right into Voc rehab or all the other programs that come with adulthood. And while we only stay in this one area, a child, they go all the way through from one to the other. It's helpful for families and children to think about that as a full lifespan experience rather than, okay, this one thing is now ending and now I'm in this completely different thing. And it's very important for families to be able to think about, "What do I want at the end of this, where am I heading?" And sometimes for families who haven't thought about it very much, it helps to think about what they don't want. So for example, this family, this is an example, said that what they don't want is - says, "I'm scared he'll always need a lot of help and he'll be lonely and I won't always be there." So they're talking about who will help that child if they're not there. What if he's lonely? We translate that into what do they hope for? Well, they want him to have friends. They want him to be as independent as possible. Okay, great. Now as we make decisions, including the very early decision of where do we go after First Steps, we want to be thinking about that, so that when we transition to preschool, what do you choose? Well, if your focus eventually is on social relationships is on independence, then which of those options is going to give him the best chance to practice some of those things? That's the idea of thinking with the end in mind. Let's talk a little bit about inclusion. What we know about inclusion is first that not everyone is clear on what it is. Here are a bunch of different pictures, you can see exclusion is where the dots that are different are just kept out of the circle. If we think of the circle as being a classroom, preschool classroom, some kind of a community setting, kiddos who are different just aren't invited in. Then we talk about segregation. Segregation is where there's a typical preschool classroom, but there's another classroom that is offered for kids with disabilities. That whole maybe separate but equal philosophy. If you think back to different types of segregation where yes, we'll provide you with some learning, but it's going to be separate from those "typical" children. Typical in quotes, because we know that everybody learns differently, not just kids with disabilities. Then we talk about integration. When we integrate, usually what that looks like is the kids who are different are brought into the same physical location as the typical kids, but there's not a whole lot of thought to how they're then going to be successful and successful in that setting. You can see they're all clustered together perhaps with an aide or an extra teacher, and they're not really brought into the classroom in the same way as the typical peers are. What we're going for, obviously, where we want to be is inclusion, right? Where the kids with disabilities, the kids without disabilities, they're all mixed together. They're getting what they need. Everybody has strengths, everybody has challenges. And it's all working in one space. That's the visual. I like this definition. Diversity Kids says, "Inclusion is looking for ways to maximize every child's sense of belonging and participation." Belonging is a really important word, I think, to keep in your forefront when you're thinking about inclusion. It's not just about what place we're going to put this child in or what services they're going to get, but it's how do we help them to feel that they belong. I want to share very briefly some of the research that was done recently at another one of the Centers that is at this Institute. Because I think it's powerful. It was not done in early childhood. And I'm sharing that for a reason. Because remember, we are thinking with the end in mind, so as we move from early childhood into school age into adulthood, We need to understand the trajectory of where we're going. The research, even though this is research in school age and high school is still very relevant because our kiddos are going to get there. What we found is that they looked at kiddos who are placed in high inclusion settings, which was 80% of the time in an inclusive setting, or low inclusion settings which was less than 80% of the time in an inclusive setting. What were their outcomes? What were the results? What they found for three through eight was that students with placements classified as high inclusion scored better on English language learning and math across the board. They also found for high school students that students that were placed in high inclusion settings scored significantly better on the tenth grade ELA English and Math IStep tests. They also found that students in high inclusion settings were more likely to graduate with a Core 40 or general diploma. And students in low inclusion settings were more likely to graduate with a waiver. Some of you may be thinking, okay, well so clearly our high-functioning kids were in the high inclusion settings and our low functioning kids were in the low inclusion settings. Of course, we don't like those terms, high functioning, low functioning. But as an example, maybe you're thinking that. This study actually held functioning study. It made sure that it basically took out the factor of how the children were functioning going in and it looked to see what the outcomes were at the end. These are kiddos that were not significantly different, but they were significantly different after they had either the inclusion or low inclusion experience. The other thing I want to emphasize is that these are not perfect inclusive settings. They didn't go in and try to teach perfect inclusion before they did the study. They just took inclusion for what it was. If the student was included in the classroom that counted as high inclusion or not. They may not have been perfectly doing all of the practices that we would say would be great, inclusive practices. And yet, we still see this very robust finding. We see that across the board, kiddos are doing better. Here's the English language results. Here's what we see, that beyond the academics, I told you about English, I told you about math. But they're also less likely to receive a disciplinary referral. They're more likely to belong to a school group, then after school, these last 2 bars. They're more likely to have competitive employment and they're more likely to live independently, which were two of the things, remember "jobs" and "independently" that showed up on that word cloud when we talked to families. Those are very important things for families. Here's a quote from Michael Giangreco from the University of Vermont. He says, "For every student who remains educationally segregated, there are other students with similar attributes, abilities, and needs who are successfully included. This simple fact suggests that whether a student with a disability is meaningfully included may have less to do with their characteristics and more to do with the attitudes, skills, structure, and practices of the adults responsible for providing education." Again, like I said, those kiddos were starting in the same spot. Whether they were put into inclusion or non-inclusive settings, often didn't have a whole lot to do with them. It was more what the school was prepared to do. The trap or the thing we're trying to avoid in early childhood is, well, it's represented by this quote. I'll read you the quote first. "Our findings with respect to placement patterns across the transition to the early elementary period are consistent with the hypothesis that initial placement in a full-inclusion program during the early childhood years creates a momentum, that results in continuing extensive involvement with children who are developing typically." That is a quote that essentially tells you this, hold on, there we go. The quote says this, "When parents are given many options, they are more likely to choose the more inclusive option." If they have the choice, most parents are going to go inclusive. When we segregate children and show parents that they need special places for their children to learn, parents lower their expectations regardless of functioning, and they're less likely to be able to be put into an inclusive setting later. I share that, I skipped ahead a little bit here. I share that because it's very important, I think, to acknowledge that where we start, where we build our momentum, that can last then through the lifespan. Early childhood isn't like, oh, well, it doesn't really matter what we do this year. We'll see what happens down the road. Only 1 in 3 preschoolers are educated with their typical peers, and it's important for us to consider why that might be. Okay, now, I shared that, and I want to stop before I summarize too fully and just say, I clearly think that inclusion is important. And I think that the research across the board backs that. Having said that, it is not my decision to make for anyone except for my own child, where they go to preschool or anywhere else. What's important is that families have the information, not that I'm pushing them to be an inclusive setting or pushing them to do one thing or another. There are a lot of options out there. There are a lot of people who can share their experiences and their perspectives to help families make good choices. They can talk to other families, they can talk to the professionals in their lives. Then they can decide what's going to work for them. I think inclusion is a good goal, but that doesn't really matter. Who am I? The bottom line is that family, they know their child, they know their family, and they're going to make the choice. That's the right choice. I will stop there. And this isn't live, so I'm not going to be able to take questions. But I do have my email here. I also have our social media for the Early Childhood Center, if you want to follow along. We do post and share information around inclusion and other early childhood topics. And you're more than welcome to email me if you do have a question about this presentation. So thank you for joining today. And hope you have a great afternoon.

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