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Welfare Reform and Its Effects on the System of Early Intervention

The importance of the transactional and ecological nature of the child's development is well documented. Literature demonstrates the importance of addressing all of the child's developmental needs in addition to building the capacity within the child's ecology. Part C of the Individual With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) recognized the importance of the ecological theory by calling for a system of early intervention to meet the diverse needs of children and their families, which is comprehensive and coordinated across agencies. Likewise, the services provided by this system should be multi-disciplinary, coordinated, family-centered, and provided in settings where children without disabilities are served. A wide array of services are to enhance the development of infants and toddlers with disabilities and to minimize their potential for developmental delay while simultaneously enhancing the capacity of families to meet the special needs of their infants and toddlers with disabilities. Although these policy provisions make sense based upon the collective literature, developing such a system has been a monumental undertaking at both the state and local levels. Key legislative developers of this important federal policy historically have described the legislation as the glue that pieces together a disparate array of separately funded categorical programs. Thus, the early intervention system requires putting together multiple public categorical programs, in addition to a host of other state and community resources. But what happens to this early intervention system when there is a fundamental change in one part of the system? Picture a geometric structure in which one of the sides has been modified. The structure, and hence the system, is no longer the same. In order for the structure to be fixed, the broken portion must be restored as it was originally or other parts of the structure or system must be modified to account for the changes and shifts in the original piece. Some changes within the structure cause more shifts, requiring more modifications, and thus being more difficult to fix than others. The enactment of the Omnibus Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) presents such a dilemma for all of those individuals within each state who have worked for over 10 years to construct and glue together a service system for infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families. These coordinated early intervention systems are now potentially in jeopardy. The processes, procedures, and financial plan that were established to support and run the system were often based on the expectations that policies and programs of individual agencies, particularly eligibility and funding, would stay the same. Recent