Correction: Wyatt Davis is a graduate of Episcopal Collegiate School in Little Rock. The wrong school was listed in this article.
When Tammy Simmons started working with Kelly O’Connor, Kelly was a 6-year-old with Down syndrome, hiding under Simmons’ desk during their first session of speech therapy.
“She was frustrated because of her inability to communicate,” Simmons remembers. “She couldn’t really tell me what she wanted.”
Today, O’Connor lives in her own apartment, works 20 hours a week, has a boyfriend, a cat and no problems expressing her wishes and opinions. It’s a life “way past” what her mother once thought possible.
Wyatt Davis’ disability wasn’t nearly as severe as O’Connor’s, but a hearing problem had slowed his development by the age of 4. With the help of the nonprofit agency Access, Davis caught up to his peers. At 18, he’s a graduate of Wichita Collegiate School and a National Merit Scholar heading to the University of Texas to study biomedical engineering.
“It’s been really fun watching him grow into a nice young man,” Simmons said. “He’s gone from the little boy who needed help talking to a fabulous public speaker.”
O’Connor and Davis are two of the thousands of children and young adults helped by Simmons and Access, the nonprofit she co-founded 20 years ago. Begun with a handful of clients in Simmons’ spare bedroom, Access now sits on 4.4 acres of land in west Little Rock and serves more than 200 people each week.
Supporters say it never would have happened without Simmons at the helm.
“She went from being a speech therapist to starting a preschool to starting a grade school, then a high school, then an adult program and Project Search,” said O’Connor’s mother, Lynn O’Connor, referring to the program that helped prepare her daughter for a job. “I think she’s extraordinary.”
Davis’ father, Scott Davis, concurs.
“I’ve often said that what’s inside her head is very hard to package.”
Scott Davis and Lynn O’Connor are past presidents of the Access board.
“[Simmons] is an immensely talented and knowledgeable person leading an organization that’s trying to help kids dealing with these issues. What it does for not only these kids but their families is unbelievable,” Davis said.
Access serves children and young adults with mild to moderate forms of a variety of disabilities, including autism, attention deficient disorder, dyslexia and developmental and learning delays. The agency operates a preschool and school, outpatient therapy and diagnostic service that draw clients from across Arkansas and surrounding states. Its scope has expanded beyond speech therapy to encompass physical and occupational therapy, tutoring services and more.
Simmons’ interests and personality permeate the campus, from the songs and gardens that are used in lessons to the atmosphere of fun and patience throughout.
On a recent summer afternoon, the preschool classrooms were quiet, their occupants taking naps. In the therapy gym, children played on specially designed trampolines and swings, unaware they were developing their coordination, strength and balance. In a classroom beyond the school’s greenhouse and horticulture center, older students were making mixed-media collages by cutting and pasting images of animals and plants onto maps of Arkansas.
“It seems easy, but it’s not if you struggle with fine motor skills,” Simmons said, pausing at the classroom door. “These kids have to work really, really hard.”
Simmons’ interest in helping children with disabilities began during her childhood in Pine Bluff, spurred by a cousin and other family members who struggled with them. She believes she got the entrepreneurial spirit needed to run and expand Access from her mother, Norma, who operated a beauty shop and greenhouse for two decades. Simmons’ father, E.L. “Bud” Simmons, had been hurt in a work accident that left him unable to walk for several years. He was never able to return to work.
“She supported our entire family,” Simmons said of her mother, who today runs the horticulture program at Access. “She probably worked 15 hours a day, six days a week. She just made it happen.”
“Kind of a nerd” in school, Simmons sang in the school choir and with the Pine Bluff Singers. Her test scores earned her a scholarship to Arkansas State University at Jonesboro, where she intended to study psychology. She changed direction after taking a course in speech pathology her freshman year.
Simmons concluded that helping children with disabilities master language — the ability to understand and be understood — would be akin to “breaking the code” for them to function in the world.
“The ability to communicate cannot be overestimated,” she said. “Imagine yourself dropped into a foreign country and you … don’t know what the expectations are.”
Simmons transferred to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, earned a bachelor’s degree in speech pathology and then a master’s in communicative disorders from UALR and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
‘IT JUST CLICKED’
Simmons worked as a speech pathologist in the Easter Seals Arkansas preschool program, from 1988 to 1993. It was there that she met Monika Garner-Smith, a special education teacher in the same program. They soon started developing their own ways of reaching children with disabilities.
“It was really a culmination of ideas,” Simmons said. “We would go to courses and get ideas, and do research, and work with students figuring out just what worked.”
“We just started being a team without even realizing it at first,” adds Garner-Smith, who is the Access preschool director. “It just clicked with us that we were able to create together.”
The basis of their approach was taking well-known pieces of children’s literature and drawing out of them as many lessons — on vocabulary, math, science and other subjects — as possible. Sometimes pulling all-nighters, they also wrote their own lyrics to children’s tunes, designed to teach other concepts or just get children to pick up their toys.
Today at Access, “music is used every day, all day long,” Simmons said.
In 1994, Simmons and Garner-Smith started Advanced Children’s Therapy (later Access) along with a third Easter Seals alumna, Cindy Young. It was in Simmons’ Little Rock home, with a spare bedroom serving as the clinic and the living room as the waiting room.
The founders pooled their money to rent space in an office park at Evergreen Drive and University Avenue that same year. The next year, at the urging of their clients’ parents, they opened a preschool with seven students.
“We would pray for rent money,” Simmons said. “We didn’t have it. We were charging things on our personal credit cards. We had garage sales.”
SHOWED A KNACK
From the beginning, Garner-Smith said, Simmons showed a knack for budgets, fundraising, making speeches and other skills needed to run a nonprofit.
“She has the business sense of knowing what to tap into and the business sense to make it happen, yet she’s never lost that sense of creativity.”
In 1998, again at the urging of clients’ parents, Access started a school for older children. Three years later, it had outgrown its space.
Simmons credits O’Connor with spearheading the $1.2 million fundraising campaign that allowed Access to buy a former church property on Breckenridge Drive in 2001. The move allowed the agency to triple in size: staff and students.
One pupil Access served in its new space was Brandon Freville, who came into it just before the fourth grade, after “really struggling” in the third grade in a traditional school, according to his mother, Laura. Brandon has cerebral palsy on his right side and some delay in comprehension.
“It allowed him to learn at a pace he was able to,” Laura Freville said. Access teachers “kind of backtracked and taught him different ways to learn.”
He attended Access throughout the rest of his school years, receiving speech and physical therapy, participating in extracurricular activities like the Special Olympics and “becoming more independent and secure.”
Now 21, he works at a funeral home, drives a commercial truck, has earned his General Educational Development diploma and one college credit from Pulaski Technical College.
Meanwhile, Access continued to evolve. Ceramics and horticulture classes were added, with products of both sold to raise money. The gym was renovated into a state-of-the-art therapy space in 2011. The same year, Access created an endowment fund and added a young adult program. Part of that program is a couple of rooms furnished like an apartment, with bed, appliances and a full kitchen. Most days, the participants take field trips to workplaces, restaurants and other common commercial spaces.
“That’s where they need to be at that age, in the community,” Simmons said.
Last year, Access partnered with Arkansas Rehabilitation Services and UAMS to launch Project Search, an internship program for young adults with developmental disabilities.
Garner-Smith said her longtime colleague “has always been very good about accepting challenges and not saying, ‘No, I’m sorry, this is all we’re going to do.’ It’s always been, ‘We’re going to do that, and it’s going to be over-the-top fabulous.’”
THE FUTURE
Simmons says she’ll probably be at Access “until the day before my funeral,” but she knows that part of building a successful nonprofit is preparing the next generation of leaders. One is Janice Edmonson, who started at Access as a graduate assistant and is now the technology resource coordinator.
“Early on in my career, she worked with me to help me find my strengths,” Edmonson said. “I see where she’s done that with other people throughout the organization, then put that person in a role where they can succeed.”
Edmonson said her boss is flexible when it comes to the family obligations of her staff, many of whom are women with young families.
Simmons has a calming effect on those working for her. “I’ve seen her stressed, but I’ve never seen her panic, which is so important in a place this big.”
Access is once again at capacity, with what Simmons calls “a pretty hefty list of folks who are hoping to get services.” She refuses to call it a waiting list. The organization tries to pair children it can’t serve with other organizations, knowing that the early childhood years are key to development. Some families have moved to Arkansas to take advantage of Access’ services.
There may be more off-campus growth in the future, whether in the form of housing for young adults or programs that are located elsewhere.
Many older Access students have spent the summer volunteering to spruce up the grounds in preparation for a 20th anniversary celebration next month. Simmons said it will be a homecoming of sorts, with music, food trucks and tours of the campus.
Simmons keeps in close touch with many of the children and their families who come through Access.
Wyatt Davis, who now stands 6 feet 5 inches tall, has been volunteering at Access this summer and spoke at the organization’s biggest annual fundraiser, “Starry, Starry Night,” in October.
As for O’Connor, who hid under Simmons’ desk as a child, their relationship continues today.
“Now it’s fun just to go to dinner with her,” Simmons said. “I take her out for her birthday and she takes me out for mine. It’s hard for me to even see her at a disabled level today, she functions so well.”