Growing Project Memphis

Early Intervention for young children and families with special needs

Dr. Laura Casey, professor in Instruction Curriculum Leadership, and her commitment to serving young children (aged 0-2) with special needs and their families continues to be rewarded through state and federal grants with recent awards from the TN Department of Developmental Disabilities (DIDD) totaling $2.7 million dollars. These recent awards are the result of Casey’s ability to sustain, maintain, and grow a long-standing home and community grant with the state known as Project Memphis (PM). Under her leadership, this early intervention (EI) service-based grant has grown exponentially in terms of the number of families seen and the type of services provided.

Over the last few years, PM expanded beyond developmental therapy to also include Applied Behavior Analysis – ABA assessment/therapy and psychological evaluation/diagnostic services through the TEIS’s vendor program. This expansion to other disciplines resulted in a team-based, interdisciplinary approach to EI. The team approach is the gold standard for EI with UofM leading the way in west TN. Of the $2.7 million, DIDD awarded to Casey and her team, $1.1 million was earmarked to continue home and community-based services through 2024.

Also, included in the $2.7 million was a three-year award for $1.6 million to add center-based therapies for this population. The center-based services, once housed and ready to launch, will offer a wide array of services from diagnostics to individualized and small group programs aimed at maximizing each child's development across several domains (adaptive-social-emotional- behavioral) using a team-based approach designed to promote inclusive preschool readiness. The new center-based grant will work in tandem with the home-community grant and will seek to employ licensed behavior analysts, registered behavior technicians, developmental therapists, social workers, and psychologists.

These new grants will not only benefit the Memphis community but will also add breadth and connectivity to other existing service-related grants in Instruction, Curriculum, and Leadership ( ICL) and other College of Education (COE) initiatives. Specially, these new opportunities will serve as an opportunity for wraparound services for families at the Integrated Community Health Clinic (ICHC) that will be comprised of ABA and the counseling programs/ departments in COE. The new grants received, along with the existing initiatives, will also provide more on campus practicum and internship placements for students in our academic majors and minors, better connect with other free service grants on campus such as Regional Intervention Program (RIP: a parent training program for children 0-6 with behavior disorders), UofM Autism Treatment, Training and Research Clinic (an autism focused grant shifting to a billing model), TN Behavior Supports Project (a school based positive behavior intervention grant currently working with SCS), and hopefully be a collaborator with the on campus school consortiums.  

For more information on these awards and/or these initiatives, contact Casey at lpcasey@memphis.edu.