Model Guide
Overview
Why Use the Child Find ACCESS Model?
- Have you noticed a decline in referrals to the early intervention (EI) program?
- Is your program not meeting enrollment targets or seeing declining enrollment?
- Do you want to fully understand the scope of efforts within the community to identify children who may need EI and refer them?
- Do you feel there are ways you could better coordinate or streamline your outreach efforts?
- Do you simply want to know if there are ways you could strengthen your child find system?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Child Find ACCESS Model may be useful for you.
Model Guide Introduction
The Child Find ACCESS Model systematically guides local teams through a phased approach for exploring and improving local child find practices. The model consists of five components:
- Leadership Team comprised of EI and key child find system partners to guide the work
- Data Access, Collection, Analysis, and Use to understand the child find system, identify challenges and opportunities, and evaluate outcomes of planned activities
- Key Partner and Other Community Engagement to build on existing practices and maximize effectiveness of the child find system
- Strategic Planning and Implementation to make improvements aimed at addressing the root causes of challenges in the child find system
- Family Perspectives are centered throughout the components to ensure system improvements address issues impacting families in ways that are meaningful to them. Read the blog Centering Family Voices to Advance Access to Early Intervention to learn more about family perspectives.
Each component is discussed in depth in the Child Find ACCESS: Model Guide.
Additional Resources
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Who Is Missing from Our Early Intervention Program? Using Data to Strengthen Child Find
If a community has a certain level of need for special education among older children, what might that tell us about the number of younger children we could reasonably expect Part C to be reaching?
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Centering Family Voices to Advance Access to Early Intervention
The Child Find ACCESS model includes family voices in multiple ways to ensure that improvements to the local child find system are responsive to family experiences.
