Early childhood services for babies, children with developmental disabilities set to take drastic cut

Yahoo

28-02-2025

DENVER (KDVR) — The Colorado Department of Early Childhood is set to cut services down for children with developmental concerns and disabilities, but the state says it's necessary for long-term success.
The Early Intervention program or EI services children up to 3-year-old. The state sites budget shortfall for their reasoning and continued increase in children's referrals to the program on cutting back on services to balance funding for the rest of the fiscal year. Children will now be limited to four hours of care a month.
Currently the program serves around 11,000 each month and these changes are set to potentially take effect as early as Monday according to email correspondents with providers shared with FOX31.
These cuts will effect the majority of these children like 21-month-old Charlette. Jessica Meisel is her Development Interventionist and visits here each week.
'Getting to know Charlette and initially working on language and then kind of going from there into play skills. It's kind of been so much fun to watch her grow and starting to say words and sounds and its necessary,' Meisel said.
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Charlette, has developmental challenges and was recently diagnosed with autism. Her older brother who's 9-year-old was also diagnosed with autism when he was 3, so her mother Katherine Safilippo knew the signs.
'It got me kind of curious, she's not speaking the way that she should, and her kind of emotions and stuff were not the way a typical 18-month-old should be. So we ended up getting her evaluated with EI and it showed that she really needed speech and early intervention developmental teacher to come in too.'
Though Charlette works with Jessica once a week, Safilippo was hoping to add additional services soon. She says their physician encouraged speech to be added, but now that won't be possible through EI. Many EI children though, already receive multiple types of sessions a week.Early Intervention plans to max out families to once a week no matter the severity of the disability, forcing them to prioritize one over the other.
'It's just once a week. Jessica is the only person we have for Charlette right now. I am back at square one.' Safilippo said.
Other parents we spoke to like Kay Miller, her son currently receive multiple services and are scared for how this could change the development of their child.
'My son who is only 9 months old and currently benefiting from speech therapy, physical therapy, and dietician services, will receive half the support he is currently receiving from speech and physical therapies, and he will not be eligible for the dietician services anymore due to his Medicaid status. This is already devastating to us – the only reason my son continues to be on his growth curve is due to our dietician closely working with us to ensure his unique needs are being met, and without her guidance I am worried for his growth. And while we will continue to be eligible for his other therapies, cutting them by half will surely affect how quickly and effectively he has been meeting developmental milestones.'
Kay Miller
Children on federal assistance may not get behavioral or social services at all because those services can no longer be billed to Medicaid. Jessica currently works with 15 kids, 11 of which are on Medicaid. She says continuing her work there may be difficult with such a small case load.
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'They're the families that have the lowest socioeconomic status, there are families of color, so we are really doing a dis-service to underserved people,' Meisel said.
Meisel says with these cuts children will also be losing a solid foundation heading into Pre-K and Kindergarten. Referrals into the program have also been frozen.
In a letter CDEC gave a synopsis of this budget shortfall and current situation.
It says, 'The $3.5 million workforce investment funding, which was allocated for two years, will end June 30, 2025. Referrals to the program continue to increase and stimulus funding that was previously available has fallen off, which impacted the amount of federal funding the EI program had available for FY 24-25. Additionally, the number of children enrolled in Medicaid has decreased to around 36%. These factors, along with the implementation of multiple strategies to retain and recruit the EI provider workforce, have put the EI program at risk of significant over expenditure for the current fiscal year and a significant reduction in resources for FY 25-26 and beyond.'
Another parent Michelle Katherine's son has similar concerns as Charlette and suspected autism. 'My son is talking starting to talk, learning sign language, and has made so much progress with the amount of therapy he has had! This is the last thing he needs. This isn't a wanted program this is needed and vital!' She said.
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