In the video below, Aneesa Coomer reports on the Scottish Rite Childhood Language Disorders Clinic, which is hosting a fundraiser on April 3, 2025.
The Scottish Rite Childhood Language Disorders Clinic is hosting a fundraiser to allow them to continue providing speech and language therapy to children at no cost to families.
The clinic provides speech therapy services to over 100 kids per week, focusing on early intervention and seeing primarily children from birth to six years old. They also provide screenings within the community and work with daycare providers on enhancing communication.
Molly Beck, the Executive Director of the Scottish Rite Childhood Language Disorders Clinic in Great Falls says, “It's so important that kids really have a strong communication foundation with both understanding language and using language, certainly before they enter kindergarten is a prime objective of ours that those kids are going to kindergarten with solid communication skills and ready to learn.”
Speech therapy can also help with behaviors and enhance a child’s confidence and readiness to learn.
Beck explains, “If you are struggling to communicate with the adults in your world, really the only option that they have to communicate then is through behavior. We do our best work when we help those kids with their communication skills. But even more, we do our best work when we can help parents learn how to better interact with their kids and support their kids' learning and communication.”
Brittany Wilson has been bringing her son, Everett, to the clinic for speech therapy for about a year. She says, “He’s making a lot of progress. When our son was three, we noticed that he was having some issues articulating sounds. Once he was aware that people couldn’t understand him, it was really frustrating for him, and he's like, ‘No, I didn't say that’. But now, people are starting to understand him better and he's more confident and not getting so frustrated.”
The clinic is grant and donation based, and it costs the clinic around $80 for just one speech therapy session. Raising additional funds would allow the clinic to expand their services within the community, bringing more children off their waitlist and having the ability to bring on additional therapists.
The clinic also hopes to expand services beyond Great Falls and into smaller surrounding communities. Beck says, “We ultimately would love to expand our services into the community, but also outside of Great Falls into some smaller communities, and maybe up on the Hi-Line where there is a lack of speech therapy resources.”
The fundraiser will include a silent auction and a raffle for a $3000 travel voucher (or cash). Dinner tickets are $15, children 6 and under are free. Travel Raffle tickets are $20. Both dinner and raffle tickets are available at the door the night of the event, or they can be purchased at the clinic anytime before the event. The dinner will at the Scottish Rite building (1304 13th Street South, Great Falls). Click here for more information, or call 406-727-1088.
