Apparo Academy has announced a $4.8 million building expansion to its specialized education program, slated for completion in Fall 2022. The new building will be 16,000 square feet and will be built adjacent to the current location at 3104 Skinner Mill Rd.
According to Jennifer Jones, executive director of Apparo, God planned it a long time ago.
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Jones started conducting therapy with developmentally delayed children in the 1990s, and about five years ago, she thought, “‘These kids I’ve been working with, are they really going to be able to progress enough to go to college, to have more of an independent life? There’s got to be a better way.”
She said insurance wasn’t allowing for kids to be seen by therapists like her as much as they needed to be, and she wanted to do more.
In 2006, she started a non-profit to help pay for therapy for kids who needed it. But it came to a point where there just wasn’t enough she could do in that way. She said she prayed about it, and God laid it on her heart to start a school.
“I had no clue how to start a school. I started taking classes on how to do it in the state, what trainings I needed to do and also looking at property,” Jones said. “I took it to the board of the non-profit, and they were on board.”
The building Apparo Academy has operated in since its inception was formerly a daycare. Jones said the place closed its doors with everything inside it, which gave the Apparo staff at least a small head start on populating the future school with toys, books and more.
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“We opened our doors in July 2019 with 34 kids. We wanted to start small, prove the concept and show the community what we wanted to do,” Jones said.
And the community has responded. Besides a handful of grants, the local community has helped to fund Apparo Academy and push them across the finish line on the recent capital campaign to go forward with the expansion.
The new building will allow for around 110 children to attend each day at the year-round school. There will be 10 classrooms as opposed to the current number of three. The original building will be used as more designated therapy space once the new building is complete.
In each classroom, children who are typically developed and developmentally delayed learn and play in unison. There’s about a 60% to 40% ratio of special needs to typically developed children in each classroom on a daily basis. That’s due to the inclusion model Apparo has been built upon since the beginning, Jones said.
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“We all grew up with kids in our classrooms that we knew were different. But nowadays, you see a lot of kids with special needs sectioned off in their own classroom or in a portable somewhere,” Jones said. “It’s a narrow way to live. We train the children here to accept and love everyone they meet. This kid might need a tube to eat or that kid might squeal a lot, but to these kids here, they’re just all friends.”
The children are supervised and taught by specially-trained individuals. There are teachers and therapists with master’s degrees in special education and a full-time registered nurse on-site at all times, bolstering the support system surrounding the children.
“We just want to be a resource for the community,” Jones said. “And it’s working. Once the kids start coming here, they don’t leave.”
Tyler Strong is the Business Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at tyler@theaugustapress.com.
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