For an astounding 20 years, ACCESS Schools have served Little Rock and the surrounding areas by offering full-time education, therapy, training and activities for young people with learning disabilities. As the school embarks on a year of festivities to celebrate this milestone, its students, teachers, therapists, families and board members, including chairman of the board and Regions Insurance vice president, Kurt Knickrehm, are using the anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the last 20 years and use the knowledge they’ve gained to propel them into the future.
What began as a small therapy clinic, ACCESS was founded by Tammy Simmons and Cindy Young in 1994 and housed in an office building in midtown Little Rock. It quickly became obvious that a classroom setting would enhance the progress of their students, and so, a year later, Monika Garner-Smith joined the duo when they expanded services to include ACCESS Pre-School with one classroom of seven students.
“At the time, we never thought we would grow into the setting we have today. The needs of families have always dictated the direction of ACCESS and we have grown incrementally along the way,” Simmons says. Four short years later, demand for a school-age program was high enough to warrant a second expansion of services and ACCESS Academy was born. “The office building was not the most optimal setting,” Simmons admits. “Our playground was down a set of stairs and our kitchen consisted of a microwave and toaster oven. Our board was passionate about helping us seek a new location to serve more students and clients.”
Around this time, Kurt Knickrehm, who had recently relocated to Arkansas from Denver with his wife, Ashley, and two children, Cole and Lily, was serving as the director of the Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS) when then-lieutenant governor Win Rockefeller took him on a tour of ACCESS Academy. “There’s such a need in our community for the services that ACCESS provides,” Knickrehm says of his first impression of the school. “The amount of time and energy it takes to raise a child with disabilities is a staggering issue to deal with from a parent’s standpoint. And what we saw here was an opportunity to deal with those issues in a very holistic way while also looking for services that could offer real improvements in their children.”
By 2001, ACCESS had already seen steady growth since its inception, and as they moved into their new location on Breckenridge Drive, a 36,000-square-foot space in the former Little Rock Christian Academy campus, the school was able to triple in size and begin offering programs outside the classroom. ACCESS Gardens and Ceramics programs were added, and student activities were expanded to include student council, prom, cheerleading and participation in local and state Special Olympics programs.
Knickrehm joined the ACCESS board of directors in 2005. He was able to apply his knowledge from DHS and his passion for the school’s mission to help with the ever-expanding list of services ACCESS could offer to its students, as well as to the community. “Because it meets so many needs for the families who have children here, ACCESS becomes important not only for those families but for the community around them as well. It’s important for our educational system, for the businesses that are hiring our family members, and frankly, ACCESS is a model for other institutions, not just in our state but in all the Southern states.”
“Not every state has a resource like ACCESS,” Simmons adds. “We have had families move from Dallas, California and Alabama, to name a few, to place their children in our programs. Many families will tour ACCESS before making decisions about taking jobs here.”
As both a board and community member, Knickrehm was learning firsthand the effect ACCESS can have, not only on a child’s life, but on the lives of those around them. He and his family had moved in next door to a family who had a child that was a student at ACCESS. “She was over at our house quite a bit,” Knickrehm says. “She was an exceedingly gregarious young woman, and out of the blue, she called up my son, Cole, and asked him to be her date to ACCESS’s prom. My son, unbeknownst to anyone else, said yes. No one had figured out scheduling or transportation but regardless, they had a date. I ended up chaperoning them that evening, so I got to be a part of the first ACCESS prom. I was very proud of both my son and of ACCESS that night.”
When Knickrehm began his service to ACCESS, the school offered just one level of service – the program for school-age children. They have since expanded to include a therapy program, after-hours programs and an assessment and testing component. “The biggest change since I’ve been working with ACCESS has been the extension of those services to the older population,” Knickrehm says. “Not just high school, but beyond that, focusing on the vocational training after students finish school. Project Search is the first push into true independence, which is really what the ACCESS mission is all about,” Knickrehm says.
Project Search is a joint effort between ACCESS and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in which individuals with developmental disabilities learn sustainable, marketable skills during internship stints at UAMS in the hopes of receiving a related job in the workforce later on. Teaching these life skills to ACCESS students is a top priority for Knickrehm, who now serves as chairman of the board of directors. “How do we continue to support these individuals after they are no longer in school?” he asks. “We have to identify opportunities for them to be productive in the workforce, and maintain those opportunities. Project Search fundamentally changes the game.”
With 20 years under its belt, ACCESS has grown from a classroom of seven children to serving more than 200 clients and students of all ages per week. The group continues to grow every day, though exactly what the future holds is uncertain. Recently, Knickrehm challenged ACCESS to find new and innovative ways to track the improvements of students going through the ACCESS programs with a data-driven component. “The tools are all over the board, and there’s no real consistent patterns,” he says, “but I think despite it being a challenge, we need to be able to get those outcomes in some sort of meaningful format so that payers can know, parents can know and we can all gauge what’s working and what’s not.”
For Simmons and the other founders of ACCESS, it’s dedicated supporters such as Knickrehm who act as the backbone of the organization. “As a leader, Kurt is a strategic thinker and at the same time, very practical in discussions of big initiatives,” Simmons says. “He pushes us toward the future in meaningful ways and encourages us to keep refining and improving our processes. With this type of leadership, I’m confident we will continue to provide quality services that reach more families.”
