Jennifer Jones believes all the roads she’s traveled in her life have divinely converged into the path she’s on now.
Jones, who began her career as a speech pathologist, opened Apparo Academy in 2019. The only center of its kind in Augusta, Apparo is a faith-based, child-learning center that combines therapy as well as education for young children. It also offers separate outpatient therapy services.
Jones knows well the challenges parents of children with special needs have.
“We adopted five kids with special needs in six years. That’s the path God took us on,” said Jones, whose children range in age from 14-29 and have a variety of medical and developmental conditions. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Then God put it on my heart to start Apparo. I knew what I needed to do to help the children because I was a therapist and educator. I know what parents need and I know what’s lacking in the community.”
Jones has worked as a therapist for 30 years. At one time, she ran a preschool for deaf children in Augusta.
Over the years, Jones grew frustrated as “Medicaid and insurance started dictating what children could receive for therapy,” she said.
In some cases, children were relegated to one 30-minute therapy session a week. If the child or therapist was sick or a conflict came up with the appointment, that time was never made up and that session lost.
“There are one million neural connections every second in children under the age of 3. Their brains are 90% developed by the age of 5,” she said. “Why are we not doing more when they are young —when we really have the capacity to change their trajectory in life instead of waiting to 7 or 8 and giving them 30 minutes of pull-out once a week? It’s not going to change anything. You can’t learn anything in 30 minutes a week.”
She took matters into her own hands. At first, she started providing extra therapy for free, then her brother suggested she form a non-profit. She did that about 15 years ago and started raising money to help pay for extra therapy sessions for children.