The staff of the Children’s Center for Communication and Development at the University of Southern Mississippi recently received a welcome gift to aid in the non-profit center’s mission of providing free therapy and education services to children up to five years old with complex disabilities, courtesy of a grant from the Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi Foundation.
The grant, which was accepted through the USM Foundation, will help fund the construction of a new, custom-built playground for the center’s children, and will also be used for bi-annual inclusive play events with other children in the community. In anticipation of that project, officials held a groundbreaking on March 21 at the center on Fraternity Drive at USM’s Hattiesburg campus.
“We are beyond excited to be starting this project,” said Courtney Tesh, who serves as director of communication and development at the center. “We don’t use our playground just for recess – it’s not a typical playground setting for our kids.
“It’s another setting for therapy, and it’s a really motivating one. So oftentimes, our little ones will reach their goals and milestones – they’ll walk or climb up stairs, or say words they haven’t said, like ‘my turn,’ because they’re so motivated by that space and setting. So to have this new playground, it’s just going to be incredible and completely custom-designed with our children and families in mind.”
The playground will feature play structures that are specifically designed for different age groups, including equipment for toddlers all the way up to five years old.
Structures will include two ziplines, which will be fully accessible for all the center’s children. One zipline will be more challenging, while the other will allow children to be buckled in and safely pushed from one side to the other.
“Those will be great opportunities for children to use their language to say, ‘on the count of three, I’m going to go,’ or where they practice that turn-taking with friends and speaking to each other,” Tesh said.
Construction of the playground is beginning this week, and work is expected to be finished by sometime in August.
“Basically, by the time our kiddos are back in therapy again for the next year, we expect to have a whole brand-new playground for them,” Tesh said. “Everything will be accessible by wheelchair or by walker – a lot of our kids use equipment to help them move, so it will be all accessible for those children.
“Then there will be different levels, because we like to encourage our children to climb stairs, or to transition to another level. All of those things are ways that we work in therapy, and ways they can be working without even realizing they’re working. That’s kind of the key, is to design it as play.”
Officials from the Children’s Center are not able to reveal the amount of the grant or cost of the project at this time.
The facility was established in 1974 and serves children with special needs included, but not limited to, speech, hearing and language differences, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism, rare genetic diagnoses, or other conditions related to premature birth. The center also provides professional training to students at USM and other universities and colleges in the areas of speech-language pathology, audiology, special education, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social work, nursing, and recreational therapy.
For more information, visit https://tinyurl.com/3bnmxu4y.
