Angela Traweek, vice president of pediatrics at Friendship Community Care in Russellville, said the nonprofit organization is finally able to help parents who need after-school care for their special-needs children.
“It’s something parents have asked for years to do,” she said. “My heart goes out to them; it always has. For over a decade, I’ve had parents with these desperate eyes, ‘What am I going to do with my child after school?’ We can help bridge that gap for parents.”
Friendship Community Care, a nonprofit organization that serves children and adults with disabilities, created a program called Link It Up! to provide after-school care from 3:30-6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. It will begin in August at the Russellville location, 1301 Russell Road. Special-needs children, as well as their siblings, can enroll in the program.
“We’re going to cap it at 20 kids this year,” Traweek said, adding that she expects the program to fill quickly. “Word of mouth is just going to fly like lightning.”
Traweek said schools take care of children until 3:15 p.m.; then parents have to scramble.
“A lot of area day cares in the community are just not equipped to take care of the medical and development needs of those children,” she said. For example, a child might need a feeding tube or catheterization.
“We have a sliding-scale fee that they pay based on their income. It’s like a private day care, but it’s got additional supports with it for those children with special needs,” Traweek said.
The idea behind Link It Up! is to have companies and corporations help sponsor children for the program.
“There’s not a significant amount of funding for it,” Traweek said. “We’re dependent on corporate sponsors and community support.”
Entergy will support the first year of after-school care by providing funds for playground equipment for special-needs school-age children, Traweek said.
Parents, particularly those with special-needs children, are often “burdened with expenses already,” she said.
Also, Traweek said, it’s “very costly to our program” to buy the food and provide the services for the after-school program. Two paid staff members and several volunteers will run the program, she said.
Erin Aylor, who is certified in early-childhood special education, is the director of Link It Up!. She has worked at Friendship Community Inc. since May 2014.
“Basically, we just started the program from scratch,” she said.
Aylor said it is the first program in the state to provide after-school care five days a week for special-needs children in kindergarten through high school.
Students might have a physical or medical disability, she said.
“It could be an intellectual disability, traumatic brain injury — maybe a child has Type 1 diabetes, maybe a life-threatening peanut allergy,” she said. “One year, we may have more kids with autism, or cerebral palsy or Down syndrome.”
Aylor said two of the main goals with Link It Up! are to support parents during after-school time and summers.
Summer day camps are part of the program, and the first was held last summer. This year, the day camps for school-age children were extended to three weeks and funded with two grants.
The Magic of Flight camp, held last week, paired autistic children with typically developing children at a day care. The camp included hot-air-balloon rides, magic shows and more.
Aylor said summers are a difficult time for working parents — who often have to switch shifts, go to part time or quit their jobs to care for their children.
“It affects their family income,” she said. “Our whole goal is to help parents not be so stressed out.”
Through the after-school program, the special-needs children can receive therapy, if needed, and “homework help, definitely.”
The curriculum will focus on social and life skills, Aylor said.
“The Russellville School District will bus children to us. For the Pottsville School District, we will run a bus and pick them up,” she said.
Traweek said the goal is to provide after-school care this first year, then expand it to daylong care in summer 2016.
Aylor echoed what Traweek said about needing corporate support.
“Let’s say we have someone who works for Walmart, or a different company,” Aylor said. If that parent has a child enrolled in the after-school program, “our goal is to see if their business would like to be a sponsor.”
Friendship Community Care has been in Russellville for 43 years, and it has nine preschool locations in the state. The long-term plan is to duplicate the Link It Up! program at all the locations, Traweek said.
“I’m most excited about finally meeting a need for these parents,” Traweek said. “We need it to be self-sustainable. I want it to continue; that’s why the community support is so important for us, in order to keep it going.”
For more information about the program or to enroll a child, call Aylor at (479) 264-3288, email aylore@fccare.org or call (479) 967-2316.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.