In a part of the state famously lacking the resources to adequately attend to its population of drug users, not to mention its citizens affected by mental health issues, the newly opened Solid Ground Counseling Center seeks — in its small way — to redress that wound.
Solid Ground is located at 108 E. Madison — a tiny warren of rooms squeezed between separate entrances to the Sophisticated Rose boutique. Its outside signage right now consists of four posters and a printout showing its hours.
Ignoring the modest exterior, the center will provide the community an ambitious menu of services — substance abuse treatment, domestic violence counseling, trauma recovery services, individual and group counseling, family conflict resolution and more.
Kim Bowers, who opened Solid Ground’s main office, in Burlington, nearly four years ago, hopes to duplicate that location’s success in Iola.
But it wasn’t on a whim that Bowers chose Iola. Solid Ground arrived in large part to fill the void created when Preferred Family Healthcare vacated the scene last summer.
PFH, during its run in Iola, provided essential, and mandatory, outpatient services to participants in the 31st Judicial District’s successful drug court program.
“So [Chief Judge Daniel] Creitz was looking for someone else to come in to provide intensive outpatient services,” explained Bowers. “Right now, it’s really hard to get assessments in a timely manner. You’re supposed to have them done within about a week. Currently, they’re running at about six weeks for an assessment. After [PFH] left — because the [Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center] was so busy — it became a very lengthy process to get an assessment.”
Bowers is sympathetic to the financial duress that PFH claimed to have encountered during their tenure in Iola. “The only part that offends me is that the community here was told [by PFH]: ‘We’re leaving, because there aren’t enough addicts here to serve.’ That is absolutely not true. And that became apparent to me the first week we were in Iola — the number of families struggling here is heart-wrenching.
“But that was [PFH’s] explanation of why they couldn’t make ends meet,” continued Bowers. “It is hard to make it in this field…but to tell a community that is struggling so much, especially with methamphetamine addiction; to look at them and tell them there’s not enough business — well, they were owed more of an explanation than that.”
IT’S MORE than an idle complaint on Bowers’ part. Her frustration runs deeper, born largely of the fact that when PFH left, they took much of the funding with them.
In 2007, the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services selected a privately held managed care company called ValueOptions (currently merging with Beacon Health Strategies) to oversee the delivery of grant funds intended — in Bower’s words — “for those who live in poverty and do not have insurance but are in need of treatment for substance abuse.”
PFH was a state-approved provider for ValueOptions. Solid Ground, which arrived in Iola last month to do much of the same outpatient work, has been denied those funds.
“I am told no new providers will be allowed to enroll in this program for at least another two years while [the state] figures out how to reorganize the program,” reflects Bowers, who has appealed first-hand to representatives from KDADS.
“It’s not that they can’t open that up to us,” says Bowers, “it’s that the state chooses not to.”
According to Bowers, the only agency in Allen and Neosho counties allowed to be a ValueOptions provider is the mental health center.
