Prior to 2003, Pediatrics Plus was primarily a home-health business, sending therapists into individual’s homes to provide occupational, physical and speech therapy to children.

But everything changed when owners Amy Denton, PT, and Krista Tapp, OT, opened their first outpatient clinic. The duo says they became even more invested as they listened to parents talk about what it was like to raise a child with special needs. They realized very quickly that regardless of a child’s abilities, parents simply want their children to have friends, be happy and be able to participate in the activities they enjoy.

As Denton and Tapp watched their students work diligently, they thought about the true purpose of all the hours they spent in therapy each week: Accomplishing therapy goals is about giving children with special needs a chance to participate in “real life” just like their friends and siblings. But unfortunately, in many circumstances, these kids are often left out because of their continued challenges.

Community Connections, a program that provides extra-curricular activities for children of all abilities, came from those early conversations. Acts Jr, a theater program founded by Tapp and Pediatrics Plus OT Lynne Hollaway, debuted, and was soon joined by soccer, football, dance, art, music, golf and martial arts classes. The program also includes an Autism Resource Center and the popular ICan Arts & Resource Center. Today, Community Connections provides activities for over 500 children in central Arkansas.

During this time, Pediatrics Plus continued to provide therapy services to children in all environments, and added developmental preschools in the Conway and Little Rock locations, as well as outpatient therapy clinics in Russellville and North Little Rock. The Developmental Preschool integrates typical and special needs children ages infant-6 years. They allow staff to enroll their own children into the program, and encourage parents to enroll typical siblings of children with special needs into the program. The foundation of the day-treatment program is literacy and language, social-emotional development, and brain development. “Over the past few years, we have really studied how to maximize brain development,” says Denton. “Multi-sensory, hands-on experiences are proven to be the best way, because those activities simultaneously stimulate all the different centers in the brain and result in a more dynamic brain. Therefore, we incorporate as many of those activities as possible into our preschool day.”

The Pediatrics Plus therapy clinics focus on researched-based, skill-driven therapy. “Over the past ten years, we’ve continued to retain our therapy mindset,” says Tapp. “As we began to serve more children with developmental delays, we continued to make sure we secured and broadened our skill base. We didn’t want to fall into a strictly developmental mindset and work only on developmental milestone delays, but to really look deeper and address the impairments that may cause them.”

Pediatrics Plus’ most recent addition to the variety of services is a very different one. As the company continued to receive referrals for children with special needs and developmental delays, Denton and Tapp also began to notice a growing number of parents requesting services for children who were struggling in school. A number of students were referred for after-school speech or occupational therapy, but what they truly needed was some type of intervention. Pediatrics Plus purchased Learning RX in March of 2013 to serve families who need something other than therapy. The brain-training program works to improve the cognitive function in children and adults, improving skills from working memory to audio and visual processing speed. Learning RX is not tutoring; instead, the program administers an assessment for each child, which looks at the specific components of brain function and determines which show areas of need. The program then targets those areas through intense, research-based brain training exercises, and produces dramatic results.

For more information, visit PediatricsPlus.com, CommunityConnectionsAR.org, or LearningRX.com/LittleRock.