About Us
In this guidebook, parents who have young adult children with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities (IDD), share their personal journeys to accessing and utilizing adult services for their children in Boulder and Broomfield Counties.
Our goal is to share the individual options and decisions that parents and their children have navigated through to work towards a meaningful, engaged and purposeful adult life for their sons and daughters. Adult services for persons with disabilities differ from children’s services in that they are based on different criteria for eligibility. So, while everyone who contributed to this guidebook has a young adult that met the state criteria for IDD and was a client of our local Community Centered Board, Imagine!, you will see that we took a lot of different paths. Our children are working, going to college, or participating in day programs, recreation programs and therapeutic programs. Some need full-time attendant care; others are using public buses on their own to get to classes and jobs.
Through our experiences of navigating the bureaucracy, the eligibility requirements, mounds of paperwork, meetings and phone calls, we have learned a great deal about how to navigate those systems in our community. Every one of us has faced challenges on this journey. Some of us hired lawyers, others camped out at the social security offices until our numbers were called, and others, again, struggled and failed to find Medicaid providers to provide the services their kids needed. We are weary and wise. And we want to help the next wave of families finishing high school (and 18-21 transition services) to navigate the support and services of the adult-care systems in our communities.
We joke about the after school experience becoming an “endless summer” for our kids, and that has become very real to us. When we had little kids, and school was out for the summer, we had to plan those 10 weeks to keep our kids safe, active, and engaged until the summer was through. For those of us with adults with IDD, we have to plan like summer for the whole calendar year, every year, until we ‘fall off the perch.” Unlike our parent peers whose typical high school teens are emancipating, our jobs as parents get a whole lot harder and more involved when our children reach adulthood. As most of us are also near the age of retirement, we have to face the truth, that we are now and forever, full-time case managers for our children, in addition to being their parents. We have to learn to negotiate new systems that we know nothing about, and we are expected to become instant experts. We face the future with hope, but also with fear and even with some resentment. Just as our kids are eager to become adults, we are facing our elder years and have to confront our own mortality. That means planning for our kids’ old age. It truly can feel like an endless summer.
Using our hard-earned expertise and speaking as a collective ‘we’, we will share our stories and also share information about the agencies that offer services and supports for yours and our kids. These are the main systems we navigate in this document:
Our goal is to share the individual options and decisions that parents and their children have navigated through to work towards a meaningful, engaged and purposeful adult life for their sons and daughters. Adult services for persons with disabilities differ from children’s services in that they are based on different criteria for eligibility. So, while everyone who contributed to this guidebook has a young adult that met the state criteria for IDD and was a client of our local Community Centered Board, Imagine!, you will see that we took a lot of different paths. Our children are working, going to college, or participating in day programs, recreation programs and therapeutic programs. Some need full-time attendant care; others are using public buses on their own to get to classes and jobs.
Through our experiences of navigating the bureaucracy, the eligibility requirements, mounds of paperwork, meetings and phone calls, we have learned a great deal about how to navigate those systems in our community. Every one of us has faced challenges on this journey. Some of us hired lawyers, others camped out at the social security offices until our numbers were called, and others, again, struggled and failed to find Medicaid providers to provide the services their kids needed. We are weary and wise. And we want to help the next wave of families finishing high school (and 18-21 transition services) to navigate the support and services of the adult-care systems in our communities.
We joke about the after school experience becoming an “endless summer” for our kids, and that has become very real to us. When we had little kids, and school was out for the summer, we had to plan those 10 weeks to keep our kids safe, active, and engaged until the summer was through. For those of us with adults with IDD, we have to plan like summer for the whole calendar year, every year, until we ‘fall off the perch.” Unlike our parent peers whose typical high school teens are emancipating, our jobs as parents get a whole lot harder and more involved when our children reach adulthood. As most of us are also near the age of retirement, we have to face the truth, that we are now and forever, full-time case managers for our children, in addition to being their parents. We have to learn to negotiate new systems that we know nothing about, and we are expected to become instant experts. We face the future with hope, but also with fear and even with some resentment. Just as our kids are eager to become adults, we are facing our elder years and have to confront our own mortality. That means planning for our kids’ old age. It truly can feel like an endless summer.
Using our hard-earned expertise and speaking as a collective ‘we’, we will share our stories and also share information about the agencies that offer services and supports for yours and our kids. These are the main systems we navigate in this document:
- HCBS IDD Medicaid waivers for Adults (Supported Living Services and Developmental Disabilities)
- Social Security (SSI and SSDI)
- Medicaid & Medicare Health insurance
- Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR)
- Probate Courts: Guardianship and alternatives to guardianship
- Transportation