Arizona Early Intervention Program: What Parents Should Know

The Arizona Early Intervention Program, also called AZEIP, is a parent coaching program for children under 3 years of age. It is a free program designed with parent’s concerns at the forefront of the program and is reserved for children in the lowest two percentiles of development. Your questions and concerns guide this program, and an early interventionist coaches you on ways to enhance your child’s development. 

The early intervention team includes a physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech therapist, and developmental special instructor. Depending on your team and your needs, you may also have a vision specialist, hearing specialist, social worker, or psychologist. Each zip code is assigned to a specific team, and this team visits several zip codes. Early intervention is an amazing resource that helps you learn from professionals, and professionals to learn from one another. Many pediatricians do refer children with delays in development to AZEIP, but only a few qualify for services based on their delays.

Apply to AZEIP

Dr. Nikki has nearly 5 years of experience in AZEIP and has an amazing foundation of knowledge due to the professionals on her AZEIP team. In this program, you will be assigned one main provider, the team lead, who attends nearly all of your visits. If needed, other professionals generally join your team lead, and they are referred to as joint visitors. Visits generally occur several times per month. Each session is geared toward reviewing any changes that occurred since the last visit, what’s going well, and your current concerns. 

This program works for parents with their children for most of the day or if there is another preferred childcare provider in the child’s natural environment. AZEIP is a great program for parents who want to be directly involved in their child’s development and can make the time to practice specific strategies given to them by their team. Many AZEIP team members have their primary availability between the hours of 8-4 pm.

What many parents end up saying about AZEIP is that they would like more direct intervention, as they struggle with performing the coaching interventions after a long day of work, errands, and taking care of the house. This is when many families opt to supplement AZEIP with private therapy to have the best of both worlds. Private therapy is generally more hands-on and can be approached with more of the therapist-identified concerns in addition to parent concerns. There is less expectation for you to incorporate each strategy into your daily routine when pursuing private therapy. Applying to AZEIP is free and can be done by you, a friend, or a professional. It can be done here.

Department of Developmental Disabilities

After a child turns 3, AZEIP services and your team of providers can no longer provide you with free, in-home services. Often, children in AZEIP can qualify for developmental preschool, which offers therapies in the school setting at a frequency that the school evaluation team deems necessary. Although school-based therapies are incredibly helpful, they are only geared towards success at school, on the playground, or in the classroom rather than other concerns outside the classroom. Sometimes, families also apply for the Department of Developmental Disabilities (DDD) before their children ‘age out’ of AZEIP. 

DDD is a program that provides payment for therapies as well, but generally, the companies that accept DDD have long waitlists. Finding a therapist in a network with DDD can take months to years, especially when seeking in-home services occurs after school. This is why many of our families with children with disabilities, or who are in the DDD program, opt to pay for therapy privately or utilize their ESA funds towards their therapies. 

This involves taking the funds that would be delegated to the public school and applying them towards private tuition, homeschooling resources, and other therapy interventions. You can learn about how to apply here.