Program serving children reflects Baylor’s Christian mission
For more than fifteen years, Baylor University’s Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders (CSD) has partnered with the Waco Scottish Rite to host Camp Success, a free intensive summer language and literacy intervention program for children. Over the years, Camp Success has grown at a rapid pace — graduating a program-high 84 children in the summer of 2017 — due to its demonstrated effectiveness and growing reputation in the area.
Now the program’s future has been strengthened by a $1.6 million gift from the Waco Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation that will create a permanent endowment for Camp Success. The endowment will provide resources for the program, supporting CSD faculty, staff and students as well as the growth of the department’s nationally ranked graduate program and enhancing community outreach to raise awareness about this valuable resource for Central Texas children. It also will provide resources for the annual end-of-camp ceremony, during which children and their families celebrate their tremendous progress and successful completion of the program.
“Waco Scottish Rite Bodies have long been a source of support for Baylor University and the families in our shared community who rely on the resources available through Camp Success,” said Baylor President Linda A. Livingstone, Ph.D. “We are truly grateful for Scottish Rite’s decision to create this generous endowment that will ensure the long-term health and trajectory of this life-changing program, both as a resource for the children who are transformed by the literacy and language outreach and for the Baylor graduate and undergraduate students who benefit from the clinical practice setting. We celebrate what this support will mean for generations of Central Texas families.”
“Through the endowment of Camp Success, the Waco Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation desires for all children to be able to read, opening the doors and windows of the world to them and thus allowing them the opportunity to become all they can be,” said Claude Ervin, chairman of the Waco Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation. Camp Success was launched in the summer of 2003, made possible by the generous contributions of both time and resources from members of the Waco Scottish Rite. Since then, the four-week summer camp has been offered annually at no cost to participants.
“Waco Scottish Rite has supported Camp Success through giving generously of their time and resources to impact the lives of hundreds of children with reading and language disorders. This generous endowment means a permanent continuation of this program. We are thankful to Waco Scottish Rite for this life-changing gift and for the opportunity to continue to serve and transform the lives of children with language and literacy challenges,” said Camp Success director Michaela Ritter, Ed.D., associate professor of communication sciences and disorders and associate dean for undergraduate studies and international experiences in Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences.
This year, 48 CSD graduate students will work alongside department faculty, with support from Baylor CSD undergraduates, to provide evaluation, therapy and pre/post-testing for 96 children ages 5 to 17 with language and literacy disorders that affect vocabulary, word relationships, sentence structure, sound structure, reading, writing and spelling.
Camp Success clients receive approximately 50 hours of one-on-one therapy — equivalent to a full year’s worth of intervention in many school districts. The children represent diverse cultural and economic backgrounds and gain admittance to the program based on their comprehensive language and literacy assessment results. “Camp Success is a ministry to the children and their families, some of whom have struggled with language and reading difficulties for years. This intensive intervention program also transforms the lives of our undergraduate and graduate students as they see growth and success in the children they treat,” Ritter said.
The Waco Scottish Rite endowment gift follows an anonymous $10 million gift in 2015 that sparked the transformation of the educational experiences of CSD students, including significantly increasing the capacity of the graduate program, expanding service to those with speech-language needs in Texas and positioning the department for national impact as a leader in the field of speech language pathology. In 2016, the CSD department, its areas of speech language pathology, audiology and deaf education and Camp Success moved into new academic and clinical space in the Hankamer Academic Center and Cashion building. The move allowed for a major expansion of the Baylor Speech and Language Clinic, a professional clinical division of the department, which provides more than 10,000 hours of community service each year to children and adults of all ages.
The effective treatment of a communication disorder literally can transform a child’s interaction with the world and set them on a new trajectory in life, Ritter said. Children who graduate from Camp Success often leave feeling empowered, capable and enthusiastic about their futures. “It’s really exciting to see the change for kids who were reading far below where their peers were reading and to make a great amount of progress,” said Ritter, whose mailbox is often filled with high school and college graduation announcements from former Camp Success students. “It’s wonderful to get the testimonies and the letters from parents stating how much of a difference Camp Success has made. Now with this endowment from Waco Scottish Rite, this impact will live forever.”