If you drive by North Career Avenue and West 34th Street North in Sioux Falls, you’ll see Phase 1 of LifeScape’s new children’s campus taking shape. The 200,000 square-foot building on ten acres will replace our current facility, opened in 1952, to provide state-of-the-art care for children with disabilities and medical rehab needs. We call it our Journey of Hope, because with this project, LifeScape is committing to being there for children and families who need us now and for generations to come.
Phase 1 is paid for and includes the core areas – an 18-bed pediatric rehabilitation specialty hospital, a 25% larger specialty school, a 69-bed residential area, and some administration space. The larger capacity facility will help relieve wait lists of children needing services.
Today we are asking YOU for a donation to help us raise the final $5 million needed for Phase 2 of the project. Phase 2 would make a huge difference in the services for children. It would include a gym, pool, therapy pool, enclosed courtyard, clinic room, and a student-run convenience store.
The pediatric therapy pool would be the only one of its kind in the region. Although some therapy occurs in the recreation pool, the smaller therapy pool is specially designed to manipulate buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure, resistance, temperature, and turbulence, based on the condition and therapy needs of the child. LifeScape’s aquatic therapy program is led by the state’s only Pediatric Aquaticist, who is also an occupational therapist and board-certified behavior analyst.
That last $5 million would provide a separate corridor for children in the hospital to access the pool and gym areas, apart from children being supported in the behavioral therapy areas. To ensure safety, great care is taken that these two groups of children are not in the same spaces together.
Under Phase 2, an enclosed play area would be added to the outdoor space, with room for wheelchair swings, a quiet sitting area for children, and a tranquil courtyard space for staff on break. It would also create an indoor playground area at one end of the gym for children to play safely and comfortably in cold or rainy weather. (Already funded in Phase 1 is a magnificent new school playground. This is thanks to the generosity of Harold & Helen Boer, Chip Carlson with Henry Carlson Companies, and a successful $2.1 million Sioux Falls Chamber Community Appeals drive in the summer of 2024.)
A small convenience store open to staff would provide real-world experience for older students learning job skills in the vocational lab at school.
As for our current 26th Street Hospital & School property, a buyer is being sought, with proceeds applied to the construction of the new facility. LifeScape’s two outpatient centers will remain at their current locations.
Adult Day Services will also remain at its current location, and we are continuing to improve and replace homes for the adults we support, with the fifth of our new construction homes opening in April 2025. We are currently seeking donations of land in Sioux Falls to build more homes.
Watching the progress of this new facility, with Phase 1 finishing in fall 2026, is exciting. The space will be more open, with more natural light and access to the outdoors. Children for many generations to come will learn, grow, and heal within the walls going up today. But we are not done yet. The children still need all of us to join the Journey of Hope in raising the last $5 million to complete Phase 2. With your help, LifeScape will become the premiere center regionally to meet the intensive behavioral and rehabilitation needs of children. Join us with a gift here, or call the LifeScape Foundation at 605-444-9800.
