University of Texas Permian Basin will soon be offering an early intervention specialist certificate that ties in with a needed niche in the community.
Information from UTPB details that local early intervention specialist agencies report that there is currently a shortage of professionals in the field and the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that jobs in early intervention are likely to increase by at least 8 percent by 2026.
Early intervention specialists earn salaries commensurate with those of public school teachers, the information said.
Dean of the College of Education Larry Daniel said the college received a lengthy letter of support from the Texas Department of Health and Human Services backing it.
An early intervention specialist works primarily with children in the first three years of life and their families.
“It’s essentially working with children whose doctors have indicated that there could be some developmental concerns …,” Daniel said.
He added that they often work in a home setting, but it could be an organization or a clinic, as well.
The specialist works with the child on, for example, exercises to help with language.
“It may be just spending time with the child to get a better sense of the deficits that they have. It’s almost like a precursor to special education … In fact, a lot of the skills that the early intervention specialists will be using would be very similar (to what a) special education teacher would be doing at the elementary level. It’s helping to diagnose and to come up with therapies or activities that the child can do, that the family can do with the child, to help address those needs,” Daniel said.
“They may also help identify other specialists, such as speech therapists, occupational therapists, diagnostics people because they’re really not diagnosticians. They are doing kind of precursory diagnostics just by observing the child’s behaviors and that sort of thing. But for a person that wants to work with very young children in an education- like setting, because essentially it is educational; it’s developmental and educational. Other than maybe going into pediatrics or something more medical, it’s one of the job fields where a person could most be able to intervene. Of course, the other area would be childcare just routine care of children.”
He added that these specialists can be instrumental in helping to understand what the child’s specific problems are and developing strategies that help the child learn, develop and be more successful.
At the same time the university was talking about the early intervention specialist course, HHS reached out and said they needed more people qualified as early intervention specialists.
“They’d actually already looked at our current curriculum and they identified some courses that they thought would meet the academic requirements to get that certification,” Daniel said.
Daniel said HHS actually sent them a list of their saying HHS thought they would be correct for providing the academic background the early intervention specialists would need.
“We actually worked very collaboratively with them. … They not only talked about our coursework and how it meshed with their purposes, they described the pathway for early intervention specialists. It’s as much an industry certification as it is an academic certification, so the persons who wish to pursue that … have to complete some academic requirements. That’s really why the HHS had reached out to us,” Daniel said
He said the course was just approved in the spring. Daniel noted that it’s an 18-hour program.
“For the students who are majoring in child and family studies, most of the courses would be courses they would already be taking. So it is actually packaging existing coursework with the certificate sort of as the overlay and that also allows those advising those students to make sure that they are provided with other information they need in order to pursue certification in that area,” Daniel said.
“We added only one new course. The new courses is an internship class, and we really felt since we were making this a workplace oriented certificate that we should have an internship course so we’re actually going to have our students identify one of the agencies that does early intervention. And we have requirements for that class and we actually even have a first draft syllabus of that course …,” Daniel added.
He said he hoped they will have the first students signed up to be part of the certificate program in January.
“We’re just beginning to really market it internally with students,” Daniel said in a Sept. 29 interview. “We wanted to make sure everything was up into the system correctly. It had to be recognized in our systems as being a program, one could actually apply for. Those things take a little time; it’s just going through the bureaucracy of getting everything up in the system correctly,” Daniel said.
He added that this is an industry certification through HHS and not the Texas Education Agency.
“They must complete the academic requirements, but there are also, when they get their first job there are requirements that the workplace must help them complete before they can actually apply for it. They have to have the academic credentials. They must then get a job in that industry and then the industry will work with them to document that they’ve completed certain workplace competencies. Then they may apply to be an early intervention specialists through Department of HHS,” Daniel said.
The program requires students to have a bachelor’s degree before they go for the certification.
The audience for the degree would likely be child and family studies majors because they are already taking the majority of the coursework. However, Daniel said it is available to any undergraduate student at UTPB.
“It’s set up completely as a certificate that’s earned while the student is matriculating. I suppose if a person stopped out of school before they completed the bachelor’s degree, they would still have that preparation. …,” Daniel said.
It is also set up as a post baccalaureate certificate.
“This would be a nice way for a person to retool who completed a bachelor’s in another area,” Daniel said.
He added that very much like teaching, there tends to be a shortage of people qualified to do this work.
“So PermiaCare and other organizations like them are generally working hard to try to find more individuals who would be interested, who would be seeking the academic credential so they could then work with them for the workplace part to get them certified with HHS,” he said.
