EITP Director Susan Connor (left) and Michaelene Ostrosky, Principal Investigator for EITP (right).

Quick Take

• Upwards of 27,000 Illinois families are served each day by early intervention professionals.
• Last year, 3,000 early intervention professionals benefited from EITP’s training events.
• EITP offers a wealth of resources and supports, including technical assistance, mentorship, and leadership development.

Every day, thousands of early intervention professionals across the state of Illinois visit with families to offer services for children from birth through age three.

The Early Intervention Training Program provides the training, support, and resources that early intervention professionals need to excel in their work.

“We are a large, complex system,” says Susan Connor, director of the Early Intervention Training Program (EITP), which is housed in the College of Education’s Special Education Department. “The Illinois Early Intervention system serves anywhere from 25,000 to 27,000 families on any given day.”

Early interventionists—service coordinators, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, developmental therapists, audiologists, social workers, nutritionists, and many more—provide supports and coordination that promote the optimal development of children.

Extensive Training Program for EI Professionals

The supports and coordination are enhanced by the training events conducted by EITP team members. The events, which run steadily year-round, cover a wide range of topics in five core content areas: atypical child development, assessment of children with special needs, intervention strategies for children with special needs, typical child development, and working with families of children.

“Last fiscal year, we offered 50 asynchronous events and had more than 7,000 interactions with learners through those events,” says Connor. “We also offered about 100 live synchronous events, the majority of them being virtual. About 3,000 people took advantage of our live events.”

Currently, she adds, EITP has about 25 asynchronous courses that early interventionists can access.

Building the Capacity of Early Interventionists

The mission of EITP, Connor says, is to develop a system that is regionalized, responsive, and reflective of best practice in the field of early intervention in Illinois.

“Our number one aim is to build the capacity of early interventionists so that services to families and outcomes that families experience are improved,” she says. “Our whole goal is to build the capacity of early interventionists so they can then support families to support their child’s development.”

Brenda Devito believes that EITP is reaching its goal.

“We’re so fortunate to have the awesome team at EITP,” says Devito, LCPC, vice president of Children’s and Clinical Services at Clearbrook, a nonprofit that empowers adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live full lives. “Many of the things that are going well in our system can be traced directly to EITP and all of the supports and training they provide.”

EITP: More Than "Just" Training

EITP began in 2002 as the Illinois Early Intervention Training Program and was housed at United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago. In 2013, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign won the bid for the program, and it was housed in the College of Education. Michaelene Ostrosky, Grayce Wicall Gauthier Professor Emerita of Education in Special Education, is the principal investigator for EITP, which is funded through the Illinois Department of Human Services.

Connor has worked for the program since 2004 and assumed the director role in 2014.

“With our name having training program in it, that conjures up a program that’s entirely focused on training events,” she says. “I wish more people knew about the depth of resources and supports that we offer and are engaged in beyond training. We provide ongoing technical assistance and expertise, we provide mentorship for folks in the field, we provide leadership development and access to a wealth of resources on our website.”

“We also collect data and conduct research and publish articles. We have team members who have authored books. So, we not only use evidence-based information to inform our work; we also create that evidence. We don’t have a huge team, but we’ve grown up a bit together and push each other to grow and change as the field grows and changes.”

She points to research on brain development as an example.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, the information on brain development has just exploded,” Connor says. “We didn’t used to train on brain development, but it’s a big piece of what we train on now, understanding not only how children’s brains develop, but how adults’ brains develop. Because our goal is really building the capacity of the adults in the field.”

A Wealth of Resources

Information on brain development is found among the plethora of resources provided through EITP. The resources section of the website functions as a large repository of early intervention information from state and national resources.

“The EITP website and resource page is always my go-to,” says Delreen Schmidt-Lenz, MSW, statewide consultation coordinator for Illinois MIECHV (Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting). “It’s the main site we tell our service coordinators to reference.”

A Collaborative Approach

“Our passion here is providing quality, engaging, evidence-based offerings for early interventionists, and we try to model everything that we want others to do with families and other team members,” Connor says.

Part of that modeling is in employing an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to working with interventionists, families, discipline-specific providers, and other agencies.

“That shines through in the way we approach our work nationally and internationally,” Connors says. “While our primary funding is to provide professional development and all our other deliverables for Illinois early interventionists, part of our work has always been connecting with our national technical assistance partners and other national organizations, such as the Division for Early Childhood (which advances evidence-based practices that enhance the optimal development of young children). We serve on committees and on boards, we lead communities of practice with these organizations. It helps us to be better at what we’re doing to support Illinois early interventionists.”