Early Intervention: Two Families Come Full Circle

Keiani Gomes at Bay Cove’s Daniel C. Boynton Child Development Center

Bay Cove’s Early Intervention services, provided to children ages 3 and younger experiencing developmental delays, feature two separate but closely connected components. While our gifted staff of clinicians—made up of Early Childhood Educators, Social Workers, Psychologists, Nurses, Speech/Language Pathologists, Occupational and Physical Therapists—provide direct, one-on-one therapies to children with a variety of developmental issues, another crucially important part of the supports we offer is the intensive work that clinicians do with parents and family members. By involving parents in the therapeutic services directly, and by educating them on the many significant and specific daily responsibilities that come with raising a child with disabilities, our EI staff are essentially teaching parents as much as they are teaching children.

“My daughter, Riley, had a very traumatic birth, and it affected her speech development,” says Nicole, of what initially brought her to Bay Cove back in 2012. “She also had a lot of sensory issues. The Bay Cove clinician that worked with her helped not just with the speech delays, but also with managing tantrums, and so much more. I didn’t know all the things I didn’t know about having a special needs child, and Bay Cove gave me a support system that was critically important.”

Nicole Porter with her daughter, Riley, in 2012

Fast forward 10 years, and things have changed in many amazing ways for Nicole and Riley. Following Riley’s time at EI, she required no further services as she entered the public school system. Today, Riley is 13 years old and thriving—excelling in school, and an athlete who plays soccer and hockey.

And her speech? “Once she started talking, she never stopped,” Nicole laughs.

Things have changed for Nicole, as well. In 2012, she was a Bay Cove EI parent; in 2022, she’s a member of the program’s staff. Trained and employed as a physical therapist before having her children, Nicole’s experiences as a parent—and specifically her experiences receiving EI services—inspired a new direction for her career. “I had never wanted to work in pediatric PT, because I didn’t think I could deal with seeing children in pain,” Nicole says. “Having a child changes how you view everything, and the experiences I had with the EI program here made me feel like I could use my professional skills to do something important to assist and support other families that were going through the sort of things I went through.”

Nicole and Riley in 2022

In her role, Nicole works with children whose developmental delays are sensorimotor in nature. “I work on helping children with their motor function and movement, and help them learn to use assistive devices, like wheelchairs and adaptive strollers,” she says, “in addition to also overseeing service coordination, helping families get access to the full team of specialists their child may need.”

One parent that Nicole worked with was Keiani, whose daughter suffered a stroke and brain bleed at birth, and was referred to Bay Cove’s EI for PT services. Nicole was the primary clinician on the case for baby Emani, and Keiani says that the care she provided during Emani’s time in EI—and afterward—made a profound difference. “I was very well supported—Nicole was very involved and invested,” Keiani says. “Beyond all the work she did on Emani’s motor skills, Nicole also advocated for us with Boston Public Schools to make sure that she had access to services going forward. Emani is 7 years old now, and she receives physical therapy, occupational therapy, as well as services for low vision. Academically, she’s very advanced and doing well.”

Keiani is still in regular contact with Nicole—not as a service provider, however, but as a colleague. In June of this year, Keiani (who recently completed her master’s degree) joined our EI program as an occupational therapist. Like Nicole, Keiani was already working in a related field (as a home health aide at the Perkins School for the Blind) when she gave birth to a child with special needs, and her positive experiences with EI influenced the direction her career path would take.

“I always knew I wanted to work with children in some capacity,” Keiani says. “After having Emani, that experience strengthened my passion and gave me a new perspective. The staff I had here at Bay Cove were all great—as a young parent going through this, it’s traumatic. But they always made me feel like I was doing my best, helping me learn. They were in my home, becoming part of my village and my family, really. I attribute a lot of Emani’s growth to the work this team did.”

“It has been invaluable to the families we serve, as well as to our other clinicians, to have colleagues with the lived experience that Nicole and Keiani bring to our program,” says Amanda Kasica, Director of Bay Cove’s Early Intervention program. “Having that parent perspective that’s so specific to our own program has led to richer discussions among staff about how best to serve children and families and do our work.”

Working out of Bay Cove’s Child Development Center in Dorchester, Keiani is able to serve the community where she grew up. “I’m very tied to this community, and it means a lot to me to be able to give back. A lot of the families I work with are Cape Verdean, and I’m grateful that I can be the face of Bay Cove for them and connect with them from a cultural perspective. If I need to build a rapport with a parent, I’m also able to talk about something from my own personal experience as a parent, and that also really helps to break down the barriers. They know that I’ve been in their shoes.”

In the client families she works with and the challenges they face, Keiani says that she sees not only reminders of the challenges she faced with her own child, but also in her own upbringing. “My parents are immigrants, and I’m the youngest in the family—we struggled when we came here, so I know very well how difficult it is for families with less resources,” she says. “I’m passionate about helping people realize that they can make it out of those situations, and Bay Cove is a really wonderful support to help families get the resources they need. With poverty comes disadvantages of all kinds, and I really feel that the work we do here can help combat that in small ways.”

“Having staff from the communities we serve, whether that is geographically or culturally or both, is so important,” Amanda adds. “Children grow up in a family and a community, and in order to promote that child's development and provide support and resources to their family, we must first respect and begin to understand the context, or environment in which they are developing. All our EI clinicians are passionate about the work we do, but what a model for the parents in our program to have professionals who know first-hand what they are going through—both as a parent and as a member of the community—and who are there to support them in their journey with their child.”

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