Champions Center Heroic Efforts Help Children, Families
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The Champions Center for Special Children sits at the edge of town on an ordinary Anderson morning, the kind of Southern weekday that hums with pickup trucks, church signs, and the distant whine of lawn equipment. Inside, though, the atmosphere shifts: there is the gengtle laughter of little ones in the halls, the low murmur of therapists coaxing syllables and steps, and, above it all, the small, insistent sounds of children—many of whom would have nowhere else to go.
The center has been in its current location for three and a half years, a length of time that feels at once fragile and hard-won.
“We’ve been at this location for three years in October, so three and a half years now,” said the Center’s Development Director Laura Capell. The way she says it carries the slight disbelief of someone who has spent those years counting not anniversaries but families, diagnoses, and staffing classrooms.
The Champions Center calls itself a therapeutic day center, but that phrase doesn’t quite capture the density of need concentrated in its classrooms. The facility is a therapeutic day center for children living with special needs, disabilities, or medically complex conditions
They not only get specialized care while they’re there, they also get their therapies, disciplines that, in other contexts, exist as separate appointments on different days in different offices—are folded into a single daily routine.
The children arrive as early as six weeks old, some before they can hold up their heads. “We serve as early as six weeks to age five or six, depending,” said Capell. “So we’re getting them ready to transition into public school.” The word “transition” does a great deal of work here. It suggests not only the construction of basic skills—walking, communicating, tolerating noisy rooms—but also the invisible labor of preparing families for the bureaucracies and thresholds that lie ahead: Individualized Education Programs, school nurses, bus routes.
At any given time, the building hosts 50-75 children. The numbers are a record of capacity, of what the staff has been able, physically and emotionally absorb. For every child inside the center, there is at least one more whose name exists on a growing waiting list, hovering just beyond the reach of the daily schedule. The constraints are often the result of the inability to find qualified staff.
This implies more than degrees and licenses, though those are difficult enough to secure. The work demands a particular temperament: patience that withstands repetition, a tolerance for unpredictability, and a willingness to remain present in the slow, uneven progress that defines many of the children’s days. The labor market, however, is indifferent to such subtleties. Qualified therapists and nurses can find less demanding jobs elsewhere, often for better pay. The center’s staff recruitment, then, becomes one more ongoing negotiation between ideals and the arithmetic of a budget.
“Funding is always, always a challenge,” said Capell. “We are constantly looking for new grants and new supporters, which is why we do a lot of fundraising events.” The grammar of “always, always” suggests not a crisis but a condition—a chronic shortage rather than an acute emergency. Fundraising becomes part of the organizational metabolism, as necessary and unglamorous as ordering supplies.
The center’s existence depends not only on the generosity of donors and the patience of grant committees but also on something more elusive: awareness. Capell said making the community aware that “we have this gem” is also important. “Anderson County is one of only four centers in this whole state of South Carolina that serves this age group. So we really are a unique service.”
To be one of four centers in an entire state is to live in a permanent tension between specificity and scarcity. The Champions Center is designed for a narrow slice of the population—children who are very young and very medically complex—but its relative rarity transforms it into a regional resource. Parents who arrive at the center’s door often do so at the end of a long chain of referrals and rejections. The building’s modest footprint at the South Fant Education Center belies the distance, literal and emotional, that many families travel to reach it.
Executive Director Na Toya Cartledge, who joined the staff in November, has a five-year plan for growth at the center, which aims to provide more spots for children.
“Parents with children living with special needs find it difficult to find centers for them because sometimes placing them and traditional centers isn't the best fit because there may not be the staff equipped to handle the needs that they have. So just to be able to grow the center to offer more services to our families and for the community while spreading the word on what we do here is key.”
In another kind of story, this would be the place where a solution presents itself: a major donor, a legislative fix, a sudden influx of therapists. The reality at the Champions Center is slower, less cinematic. Funding continues to be “always, always a challenge.” Staffing remains a careful balance—50 children now, 75 at their highest, a waiting list that expands like a shadow. The staff keeps answering the phone, with three or four new requests a week, every week, and keeps repeating some version of the same hope: that one day their capacity will match the need pressing against their doors.
In the meantime, on a typical weekday morning, the work goes on. The Champions Center may be, as its staff insists, a gem. It is also something less easily polished or named: a place where a community’s willingness to care for its most vulnerable residents is tested, daily, in the space between what is needed and what can be sustained.
