“This project was a very interesting one that took several years to complete and probably about everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. We had lots of starts and stops with this,” said Clark County Commissioner Melanie Flax Wilt.
Nearly 50 people attended the grand reopening of the renovated Children’s Home building.
Space for families to come together
County officials kept their eyes on the goal, focusing on seeing their vision for the renovation project come to fruition, Flax Wilt said.
“I’m so happy that we’ve been able to finally reach this,” Flax Wilt said.
The complex is used for JFS services geared toward children in Clark County. The buildings will supplement JFS programming and house activities such as foster parent training, supervised visitation, staff training, county-related activities and county meetings.
The county doesn’t want to “over program” the new space, but officials want to allow space for families to come together and continue to improve, Flax Wilt said.
“I just feel passionately that I couldn’t see another building out here get destroyed, because to me, this represents not just (JFS) or county commissioners, this represents the county’s promise and caring to the children of this community,” said Ginny Martycz, the now retired JFS director.
A lengthy improvement project
The initial project included improvements to a few buildings, including the gym and training buildings, and exterior parking lots in the 500 block of East Home Road near the Clark County Combined Health District.
There are other buildings that weren’t a part of this renovation project that have been active, such as the Family Visitation Center for JFS.
The complex was originally supposed to be finished in March 2023. The training and gym building were almost complete at this time besides a few items.
However, the propane tank explosion that same month left a substantial amount of damage — the majority to the training building — that took close to $1 million to repair. This caused the renovation to be put on hold.
‘It wasn’t an institution, it was a home’
Before the campus was renovated, it was a Children’s Home that had children living there at least up until the last couple of decades. It was a group home setting with a boys building and a girls building, and there were employees working there all the time.
Martycz spoke about the children’s home and how it started in about 1878 when county residents decided they needed to find a way to take care of the children.
“There are kids who were born here, who were buried here (on the far corner of the property),” Martycz said.
There are families who still come back because that location is the only connection they have to their past families members and loved ones who had lived there, she said.
“To them, it wasn’t an institution, it was a home,” Martycz said.
‘They patiently waited for their family’
State Representative Kyle Koehler, who attended the event, said the new space is “such a bright and cheery place” that he once thought was ominous, but overtime that has changed.
“When I read this center will be used for visitations and foster training for parents, that gives me hope because we need to help these children who are in a way waiting for a better situation or for the situation at home to improve enough that they can go home,” he said.
When Flax Wilt thinks about the long process to complete this project and some of the challenges, she said she thinks about what the property once was — a children’s home.
“Patience is a theme. Yes, we had to be patient for a couple years, but think about the children who lived here. They patiently waited for their family, their forever family. Some of them patiently waited their entire childhood to find a way to go off on their own and be successful,” she said.
“That’s what services have always been through (JFS), to be able to restore this space and provide a new space and a new opportunity for families to come together and build strength in their families ... In this space now, they’re going to be able to do that.”
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