Page 13 - Mobility Management, July/August 2022

the parent catches a hold of it, then the school is responsible for buying it. And the school says, ‘We don’t have the money to purchase power wheelchairs in our budget.’
“I have heard school therapists say they’re terrified to make CRT evaluations, basically because their powers-that-be have said the school will have to pay for it then.”
“It certainly comes up because then it becomes the school’s requirement to fulfill that goal,” Morgan agreed. “And if they need to buy technology in order to achieve that goal, then they would be responsible for that.
“It’s still the problem of the school therapist not knowing that this appointment is happening. It’s not always at a major medical center. The school therapist often [isn’t] interacting with the family. The kid is bused to school, they’re bused home. It’s not like an outpatient visit, where I could talk to the parents.
“I think I would challenge the school therapists at the IEP maybe not to put it in their goals and their actual official records, but to at least ask the family: ‘Are you planning on doing any type of assistive equipment, assistive device evaluation or assess- ment with your outpatient therapy team or anything like that over the course of this school year?’ Then maybe at least they can try to find that information out.”
“We do know suppliers are in schools all the time, especially in more rural areas,” Kiger said. “They go into schools and send their techs out to grow the equipment, and that’s where the parent can meet them [and] these therapists. They’ll spec out the equipment right there. Unfortunately, a lot of it does continue to fall on that provider to be a bit of a social worker, which is hard.”
CRT That Makes the Grade
Morgan expects pediatric CRT to withstand the rigors of both classroom activities and childhood adventures: “All pediatric equipment, whether it’s to be used at school or at home or wherever, needs to be durable. Because kids are going to be using it. Those siblings can do some damage, or you have nurses and therapists that come in, and cleaning people, and whoever else.”
Perhaps an even greater challenge is making sure CRT is allowed into the classroom and fully used. Morgan noted
that small environments are common: “They’re packing kids nowadays into these classrooms. It does come into play with the [wheelchair’s] maneuverability, footprint, and things like that.
“If a kid uses a standing power wheelchair — I’ll use that as an example, because it tends to be one of the larger-footprint bases because it has to support that standing. Let’s say the school has
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