Wood County Human Services
Empowering Individuals by Offering Opportunities
Services
Human Services provides many services, including case management and service coordination. Our agency also provides people with any needed items and services. These services can range from respite care, home modifications, and/or van conversions to name a few. In our birth to 3 services, we provide occupation therapy, physical therapy, and speech language therapy to the children. We also can provide services such as psycho educators, music therapy, horse therapy, and nutritional supplements.
The list of services continues, as we offer a wide variety of things based on each individual’s services plan.
Eligibility
Many people, from Doctors, schools, to people in the community who know a individual in need for services can reference individuals to receive assistance. People can also refer him/herself to our program. Each program human services provides has a different eligibility process. Eligibility for services includes a diagnosis, daily living ability, and/or behavior issues. If an individual is referred, a time is set up where someone from human services will do an assessment of the individual and take information to see if the person is eligible. There is a computer system where information gathered from the in person assessment can be put into the system. From there the computer system calculates whether or not the person is eligible.
Agency Interaction with Schools, Parents and Youth
Half of the time we work in the community setting in families homes, in the schools as well as at individual's doctor appointments. The other half of the time our staff are in the office doing paperwork and record keeping. Our agency is very involved in the schools attending many IEP meetings. We mainly attend IEP meetings to support of the family and child. We constantly talk with the families we work with, making sure they know we are there to support them and help clarify anything they are confused with. We want to help parents feel less overwhelmed and to know they have someone on their side helping them as they go. We often go to schools to help with any behavior problems to assist teachers to solve any problems a student has to avoid the child having to leave school. In our birth to 3 program, we help the family transition the children into early education programs.
Contact Information
We are open from 8:00 AM-5:00 PM Monday through Friday
Serving all of Wood County!
Website: http://www.co.wood.wi.us/Departments/HumanServices/
Location: 2611 12th Street South Wisconsin Rapids, WI 54494
Phone: (715) 421-8840
Agency History
Wood County Human Services was created in 1983. Our wavers were created at the agency in 2004. Before that, the community had been trying to push for wavers for many years. When the federal agency made it a law that wavers could no longer be used for autism service, wavers went into affect. Our program, Birth to 3 began in the 1970s. Our Coordinated Services Team (CST) is our most recently created program that began around 2008.
Funding
Each program we offer is funded differently. Our family support is state funded. Our agency is given a certain amount of money each year for this program. The money received is distributed among children in the program. Each child has a maximum of $3000 each year that he/she can receive for this program. The children’s wavers are federally and state funded. Our agency is also given a certain amount of money each year for this program. The money is distributed among children that qualify. There is a wait list for children to get into the program. Children can age out of the qualification and another one on the wait list gets put in to the system. Our Coordinated Services Team receives funding through grant money, while our Birth to 3 program is state funded. Our Comprehensive Community Services (CCS) is also sate funded.
Human services has certain requirements from the state we must meet. Each year the state comes in and looks if the requirements are being met. If they are not met and seen as non-compliant, they discuss with us how to fix the problem.