THE INTERVENTION

Intervention Specialist, Amy Miller, explains the story of the Child Study Team. We chat about what an intervention looks like, what its supposed to do, and how it actually functions. Quickly, I was able to see a difference between organizational image and identity...

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Interventions are complicated. There's evidence, there's presentation, and then there's the feelings. Interventions imply change, or at least that is the goal, and although everyone wants a single goal, the success of the child, there are so many social and political structures that complicate change. 

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First, there's a long list of qualifiers. If a child is to qualify for help, the team needs to gather evidence because of the institutional reality; accommodations = money. And an institution like schools are fully dependent on the state. And guess what... they like to keep there money. So, gathering evidence to meet the states qualifying expectations for accommodations is the first loop to jump through. We unpack the history of the system. Where does the money come from? Who's in charge? Who makes the big decisions? And most importantly, how does someone even judge whether a person is disabled or not?

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Finally, there are the social institutions, the mental models, that challenge the success of the intervention and its outcomes. We have societal expectations about mental illness. Who's responsible? That is the questions that we are ingrained to ask when it comes to accommodating the people in our society who need additional assistance. The language that we speak, the vocabulary and emotions we have around people who are developmentally disabled run parallel to intervention stories.