By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Demand for the services offered by the Kid Spot Center – a children’s therapy center and pediatric outpatient clinic offering options like occupational, behavioral and speech therapy, as well as targeted case management – are growing. So much so that the Kid Spot Center has vacated their offices outside Olive Hill for a new location in Grayson. But even that spot probably won’t last them long. Even as they held a ribbon cutting at their new Grayson site earlier this month, they were already planning for a future move into a larger facility to meet the demand for the support they offer.
It’s an issue that the Kid Spot Center founders, occupational therapist Brandy Close and speech and language pathologist Jennifer Houk, never expected when they left their jobs as school-based therapists to open their first location in Campbellsville.
They offer more services at their other clinics, including counseling services and social skills groups, but the Grayson offices is currently limited to a few types of therapy and targeted case management, which is a more complex service which aims to help families with other stressors that could make therapy difficult.
“(Targeted Case Management) is for families who need help finding resources for their families,” Close explained. “So, if your family needs help finding a way to get food, we try to go out in the community and find (the resources that are needed).”
This can be help with navigating the social services environment for EBT cards, help securing reliable transportation to doctor appointments, and any other external stressors that might make it more difficult for a child and their family to succeed in their therapy.
“We’re here to provide full support,” Houk added. “If they need somebody present for an ARC meeting at school, we try to have somebody present, to get the families that help.”
“We just started the targeted case management service here in September,” Close continued. “So, it’s a very new service.”
Getting hooked-up with the school resource centers to make sure they can work with them is a goal, though, she said. But it wasn’t something they needed to do until the added the targeted case management. At their old location, in Olive Hill, they offered therapy services only.
“We opened in Olive Hill in June of last year,” Houk explained. “That location didn’t work out for us, so we moved to Grayson in June of this year. So, we’ve been in this area for 15 months or so.”
They had planned to open even earlier, in March, but COVID-related delays pushed that back and have put a throttle on growth since, but as things return to normal, so has the expected growth for the Kid Spot Center.
If parents are currently taking their children out of town or out of county for services like speech or occupational therapy, and they would like to move their appointments closer to home, they can start by reaching out to the Grayson center.
“They would initially need to contact Donna (Bentley, Patient Services Coordinator) and she would let you know which documents you would need to obtain for us to get authorization from your insurance,” Close explained.
Basically the same process you would follow if contacting a new doctor.
The Grayson office can be reached by telephone at (270)283-3845. You can also find them online at thekidspotcenter.com.
The duo hopes that their Grayson location can be of benefit to those local parents who haven’t had these sort of counseling and therapy resources close-by.
“You asked what this means for Grayson, and we hope it means a lot. Grayson meant a lot to us, when we got out in this area, because it reminds us a lot of the Campbellsville area, which is our home town,” Houk said.
“The reason we started the Kid Spot – we were school therapists before – and we had kids that were driving from Campbellsville to Lexington, which is about the same distance from here to Lexington, and we started the Kid Spot Center to help those families out, in hopes that if one of those kids were our kid somebody would be there to support them, and we hope for this area it means the same. That it will relieve family stress and free up time, finances, and having to take a day off work. We’re right in your back yard and can provide that same level of care.”
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes. com
