Gail Henry ties Brent Harvey’s shoes after he arrived on Tuesday at the LAP Respite Center. “We’ve gotta teach you a better way to tie these, Brent,” Henry said. The employees in the center provide the students with care and a safe place for activities after school.
Sometimes, they just need a break. And that’s just what the LAP Respite Center aims to do for local families looking for temporary relief — a weekend or two-hour-long break from seeing to the needs of their high-needs children or dependents.
This respite has enabled a single mother to receive and recover from a needed surgery, helped another couple go on their first vacation for 10 days and given many others time to take care of themselves, the center’s Executive Director Judy Wagner said.
After 20 years of service, LAP Respite Center offers in-home respite, where care providers go into the family home for a scheduled number of hours. The LAP Respite House involves up to four children or adults staying at the program’s house for an entire weekend or 24 hours. And the after-school program provides a three-to-one student-to-care provider ratio for a day care center for children ages 5-26 in special education.
A burgeoning program
The center started as a grassroots organization. A group of parents in the Lansing area came together in about 1982 in need of a way to take a break from caring for their children with disabilities — if only for a couple hours a week.
“We all want time off from everything once in a while,” Wagner said. “Every once in a while you can call into work sick, or you have holidays, but when you’re the parent and care provider for a child that needs special attention, you can’t do that. That’s a 24-7 job. You get no breaks whatsoever.”
At the time, Wagner said many of the children were staying in state institutions. As those closed and the children came home to their families, respite services weren’t available in the area. Eventually, the group got some political and monetary support from various local, state and federal entities.
In 1989, LAP (once Lansing Area Parents’) Respite Center was officially formed. For a number of years, it offered only about two hours of in-home respite care to parents once or twice each week.
Soon there were 100 people interested in the services, which were run by contracting with home health care providers who weren’t necessarily trained to work with the types of high-needs children LAP Respite Center looked after. After awhile, they started training care providers in lifespan care techniques and ethics, including areas such as communication, daily personal care, eating, feeding and swallowing, medication training and family-centered planning.
They also acquired a house from Ingham Regional Medical Center that would be used, after renovations, for a full weekend respite house.
Since the center opened in 1995, Wagner said they’ve been at the maximum of four children on almost all weekends. Since there are so many families interested in the program, they often come once every month or two months.
“Because the kids need such high amounts of care, like tube feedings, breathing tubes … typically only things mom can do … it’s not easy having that going on all the time,” Wagner said.
The next steps
When a single mother working on finishing her master’s degree at MSU came to Wagner for help in finding day care for her 14-year-old son who needed assistance, the two scoured local day care centers. But since the boy was 14, and not toilet-trained and in need of other assistance, there was no place in the area that was capable of taking him in. That was when Wagner knew they needed a day care — something they hadn’t yet thought of. The after-school day care program opened in 1996 at the Marvin E. Beekman Center, 2901 Wabash Road, in Lansing,
Kari Roosa, after-school program director, said she enjoys working with the students involved in the program and having access to the Beekman Center, where the program is held.
“It’s nice for the students to be able to have the program in an apartment-like setting to work on life skills and social skills,” she said. “We also have a really good staff.”
The day-to-day routine for the program generally entails starting off with social time, preparing a snack, an art activity, games, a large motor activity either in the gymnasium or outside, followed by a winding-down period with music and some sort of sensory activity, Roosa said.
“I’ve worked with special-needs children all my life. I was working with LAP, doing in-home care and working at the after-school program, so when the director position became available I was highly interested,” Roosa said.
LAP Respite Center provides more than 2,000 hours per month of respite care.
In 2006, adult and senior programs were added for people with disabilities, chronic illness or age-related conditions, so LAP Respite Center now has what is considered “lifespan” services.
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The people involved
Wagner said a majority of the children in the program have had their conditions since birth, although there have been some whose conditions have been brought on by catastrophes such as accidents.
“It used to be that cerebral palsy was the biggest label we worked under, but now it’s become children somewhere on the autism spectrum, although we don’t really like using labels,” she said.
The makeup of the program is consistent with national statistics, which report autism cases have grown in the past seven to 10 years and occur more commonly in boys.
LAP Respite Center has about 40 employees, some of who are MSU students from a variety of backgrounds, and five professional staffers.
Wagner said she first got involved in working with special-needs children after learning to care for her own daughter, who has Down syndrome. She was approached by her school to apply for a special education position.
“I had been learning all sorts of things from her. She was my best teacher,” said Wagner, whose daughter competed in the Special Olympics World Winter Games for figure skating in February.
She went on to study more about special education and got her master’s degree from MSU in community resource development, skills that have helped in working LAP Respite Center.
“It taught me how to bring people together to make changes to the social system,” Wagner said. “We’re figuring out how people with disabilities fit into the community as individuals, as real life donators to the community system. They’re not just takers.”
