Early childhood special education in context of pediatrics and medical home

Abstract

For many young children, special education eligibility is often concurrent and deeply interconnected with special health, behavioral, and socioeconomic needs. Because of these additional factors, the broader context of early intervention (EI) includes not only early childhood special education (ECSE) specialists but also services from a wide range of healthcare providers social service providers, therapists, and others. Although it is not the responsibility of the ECSE professional to address all these needs, when viewing the special educational requirements of individual children, ECSE educators might more completely serve the children by also recognizing the coexistence of each child’s unique health and socioeconomic issues, whether or not they appear in the child’s IEP. To comprehensively attend to the issues of children with disabilities who have diverse needs, various models and approaches have been devised, one of the more prominent of which is the medical home model.