Inside the new Joe’s Kids facility at 902 Provident Drive, Suite C, Warsaw, it looks like a child’s dream.
There’s a jungle gym, a rock-climbing wall, swings and giant balls. The 6-foot-wide hallway connecting all the rooms looks like a roadway, with a dashed line down the center.
Color choices are bright, but calming. The facility is illuminated by LED lighting.But nothing at the nonprofit pediatric rehabilitation clinic is there without a reason.
Joe’s Kids moved into its new location Dec. 27, though they’re still settling in. A ribbon-cutting ceremony is planned for 1:30 p.m. Jan. 31, with tours afterward.
The clinic has been around since February 2014, when it transitioned from Jacob’s Ladder to Joe’s Kids.
“It’s been three years since Joe’s Kids, and we’ve seen tremendous growth in that time,” Executive Director Rebecca Bazzoni said Thursday. “We’ve expanded our reach to serving a lot more than just Kosciusko County. … About 20 percent of our families are now coming from outside the county limits as more people become aware of us. We were just at the point having very little room to grow any more and serve more kids.”
In its first year, Joe’s Kids doubled its case load. In 2015, it grew another 36 percent, and close to 20 percent in 2016.
“We’re growing faster than the population is growing, so that tells us we’re still expanding our reach,” Bazzoni said.
Joe’s Kids see kids with a variety of developmental delays. “We see a wide variety of abilities at Joe’s Kids. We definitely started with a purpose of being able to serve special needs children but we’re seeing all sorts of kids,” she said.
The new facility was made possible because of the K21 Health Foundation, Bazzoni said.
“This suite was unfinished. (K21) let us work with an architect to build what would be ideal for our clients,” she said.
K21 also granted Joe’s Kids some rental assistance to make the building possible.
“We feel like we are incredibly blessed,” she said.
The speech therapy rooms are on the south side of the building. During a facility tour,
Bazzoni said when those rooms were designed, the ceilings were made higher and the walls got extra insulation to cut down the noise.
The next room is for occupational therapy. Many of Joe’s Kids clients have a sensory processing disorder, so the smaller room helps with their therapy. When Midwest Orthotics comes to town once a month, they make use of that room.
In the feeding room, a room the old facilities didn’t have, there are cupboards and a sink.
Some kids who come to Joe’s Kids lack coordination with their mouth and tongues, so kids can be fed in the room or learn skills to eat. AWS Foundation provided money for customizable seats in the feeding room, Bazzoni said.
Plaques on the walls thank the people, businesses and organizations who gave equipment and furniture.
One plaque designates Sophie’s Playroom. Sophie Long was a client of Joe’s Kids who passed away unexpectedly in September. Her parents created a memorial fund with proceeds going to Joe’s Kids. The money from that purchased the equipment in Sophie’s Playroom, except the climbing wall, which Joe’s Kids had at its old facility.
The playroom includes a jungle gym with different attachments. A ball pit is in the corner, near a zip line that can support up to 200 pounds. Swings hang from hooks in the center of the playroom. WJ Carey Construction donated over half of the cost of the steel structure for the zip line and swings, with the other half coming from the Sophie Long fund.
The colors throughout the building are more subdued than at the previous building for the sake of the kids’ sensory needs, Bazzoni said.
When Joe’s Kids first opened, just under 4 percent of its clients were under the age of 3. With a shortage of therapists serving the area, Bazzoni said they are now seeing an overflow from Indiana First Steps, and 20 percent of its clients are infants and toddlers. To better serve those children, the new facility has a room just for them.
“We didn’t have room for this in the old place,” Michele Bickel, Joe’s Kids director of community relations, said.
The wide hallway lets kids work on their endurance. Bazzoni said kids can ride bicycles inside all year, or kids who get around with walkers can master the use of them in the hallways.
Thanks to the Kosciusko County Community Foundation, the physical therapy gym has an adjustable high/low table that lets therapists work with kids in wheelchairs, and a convertible flight of stairs for kids to work on various skills.
The occupational therapy rooms are where kids work on fine motor skills. The new facility also gained a therapist office.
“Having shared office space is great for fostering collaboration, and many of our clients see all three therapies,” Bazzoni said.
Bazzoni said Joe’s Kids hasn’t increased staff yet. It added two full-time therapists at the end of 2015, and during the past year has filled their schedules more. She said they’re nearly at capacity in speech therapy, meaning Joe’s Kids will have to add staff to keep growing. Within occupational and physical therapy, Bazzoni said Joe’s Kids has the ability to grow staff more because it has full- and part-time therapists, and those part-time therapists might be interested in going full-time as the caseload demands.
“With this facility, we should have the ability to double our caseload once again,” she said. “Right now we’re committing to a five-year lease, and we’re projecting about a 20 percent growth each year.”
Along with new facilities, Joe’s Kids has a new look. Bazzoni said while the name has stayed the same, it’s gone through a rebranding, with marketing firm HRW, Indianapolis, donating its services.
“We wanted a logo and a tag line that gives people an idea of what we’re really about. And we feel they’ve done that,” she said.
Joe’s Kids wants to focus on what kids can do, not what they can’t. “We’re here to help them reach goals, so our new logo is kind of a smily face with the J, O and E as the eyes and nose because our secondary message is still JOE: Join Our Effort, because we don’t do this alone. But the secondary message under the name is Achievement Center because we’re focusing on all that our kids can do and what we help them to achieve,” Bazzoni said.
