Carousel School : Our Programs : Department of Children and Family Services

Department of Children and Family Services

Carousel has a contract to provide Therapeutic Child Care services to families needing care for their children at risk or identified with having special needs. Our K-1, Pre-school, and Infant centers are full inclusion and bilingual and are able to provide appropriate services by including the clinical services of Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Behaviorists, and Speech Therapists as a part of our classroom curriculum environment. Carousel has a 1:5 adult to student ratio with actual clinical staff participation in the classroom learning centers.

Clinical Social Workers have included our services in the case plan for eligible families to support the Early Start Program and the After School Socialization Training needs with specific programs, clinical involvement and the ongoing monitoring with an annual developmental and psychological evaluation procedure. Our therapists are available for classroom consults and can provide individualized speech therapy by utilizing a child's Medical eligibility. The clinical team are responsible to prepare the monthly lesson plans with the classroom teachers.

Our four site locations serve children ages birth - 7 years old and there are full and part time hours available as needed and/or authorized. Carousel is able to provide round trip transportation for children enrolled in our Therapeutic Child Care Program with service hours of 8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m..

We have an After School Program at Sophia Salvin Special Education Center and Pacific Boulevard Special Education Center that can serve children ages 4 - 18 years of age. At this time, there is no transportation available through our agency from the Salvin location, however, many of our children that our South Central Los Angeles Regional Center consumers are authorized for transportation home through regional center funding.

All of our locations are vendored by the regional centers to provide Early Intervention Programming and After School Socialized Training. The La Tijera site is certified Non Public Schools that deliver Special Education services to students with an IEP. We welcome the opportunity to accommodate the needs of families by working collaboratively with these various agencies to include a comprehensive early intervention, pre-school, kindergarten, first grade and after school program piece to the case plan for any child eligible for services.

The process begins within the Department of Children and Family Services agency by the Clinical Social Worker generating a 324 Child Care Referral Form and an Addendum to his/her supervisor. The supervisor signs it and submits it to the CDC for signature. The last stop is the fiscal department where the actual contracts are signed. We work very closely with this department and are able to begin child care as soon as the written or verbal approval is given from the fiscal department.