They wanted more for their son with muscular dystrophy. Now their Family Achievement Center gives others hope.

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
Updated ·10 min read

Wyatt Hauser ate applesauce with a spoon, grabbed pegs from a pegboard and walked down a carpeted hallway one day last week at Family Achievement Center in Woodbury.

For 11-year-old Wyatt, those activities are anything but routine. They’re therapeutic exercises that constitute small miracles.

Wyatt has a rare form of debilitating epilepsy that can cause hundreds of seizures a day. Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome usually strikes children between 3 and 5 years of age, beginning with bouts of staring and gradually progressing to repeated seizures that eventually become so disruptive that many children fail to develop normally. Wyatt, who began experiencing seizures when he was 7 months old, is nonverbal and regularly uses a wheelchair.

On Thursday, Wyatt walked on a treadmill and then down a hallway to FAC’s gym with occupational therapist Malorie Casalegno leading the way and physical therapist Sarah Chyzyk helping him from behind. Once they arrived, the women sat with Wyatt on the gym’s concussion-proof carpet and had him reach for a spiky green massage ball.

“Come get it, Wy!” Casalegno told him. “Both hands. Come on, you’ve got it! Come get it.“

Wyatt loves the spiky ball, Casalegno explained. He loves the texture of it. He loves the sound it makes.

Casalegno worked on getting Wyatt to visually track the ball as she moved it in front of him. She encouraged him to reach for it with both hands. One of the exercises involved moving his hands across the midline of his body – an exercise designed to improve his core stability.

Core stability is key to Wyatt’s therapy work, Chyzyk says. It helps him maintain an upright position in his wheelchair, and it means he can sit on the floor with his peers at Woodbury Middle School. It also aids in his ability to walk the school’s hallways using a gait trainer propelled by his own strength.

Wyatt’s parents, Jessica and Jeremy Hauser, learned about the Family Achievement Center, a Twin Cities-based pediatric occupational-, physical- and speech-therapy clinic, from a friend. Wyatt had been going to therapy at a hospital system clinic, but the Hausers were frustrated with the clinic’s approach.

“They kept wanting him to ‘take breaks’ from therapy, pointing to insurance limitations,” Jessica Hauser said. “Larger clinics have more of a rehab focus and not a long-term focus on how to help a child like Wyatt perform to the best of their ability,” Jessica Hauser said. “We were looking for something that would have more of a long-term plan for him. He’s not rehabbing; he’s never had these skills. We’ve got to work towards that.”

Wyatt has been visiting the clinic two times a week this summer for “co-treatment” with Chyzyk and Casalegno. He also regularly sees speech therapist Jana Smith, whom he’s been seeing since he started coming to the center when he was 5.

What sets the Family Achievement Center apart from other clinics is its focus on supporting the entire family, its focus on play-based therapy and its low staff turnover rate, Hauser said. The center also has locations in Stillwater and Bloomington.

“They are committed to helping Wyatt be the best he can,” Hauser said. “While Wyatt doesn’t communicate verbally, I know when he’s enjoying something, and he definitely loves coming here.”

Wyatt is an active member of the East Metro Miracle League, an adaptive-baseball program for kids with special needs, and regularly walks in the pool at the Woodbury YMCA. He is gearing up for FAC’s annual Move to Your Own Groove All Abilities Run, Walk & Roll, which will be held Sept. 10 at Colby Lake Park in Woodbury. This will be his fifth year participating in the event; Wyatt walks the 50-meter route and then uses his wheelchair for the 5K.

“It’s good for Wyatt to have activities that are part of the community and to be included,” Jessica Hauser said. “But it’s also good for other community members, too – to understand that there are kids out there working so hard to just be their best selves. And he’s really a pretty fun kid to be around.”

Founded by frustrated parents

Tom Hoel founded the Family Achievement Center in 2001 when he was looking for services for his son, Anthony, who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare muscle-wasting disease that causes weakness and loss of mobility. His wife, Sarah Mason, serves as the company’s president.

When Anthony was diagnosed in 1992, doctors said he would likely “stop walking at 8 years old and pass away at 12 to 15 years of age,” Tom Hoel said. “They told us to take him home and enjoy him while you’ve got him. We, obviously, did not go down that path.”

Anthony had a number of other issues, including pervasive developmental disorder, sensory integration disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.

“It was the whole gamut, and he did not do well in therapy,” Tom Hoel said. “He needed physical therapy, but he wasn’t cooperative, and he’d often get discharged.”

Frustrated with the frequent discharges and driving all over the metro area for services, Hoel started to formulate a business plan for a place where families could receive multiple services in one location.

“I really wanted a family focus,” he said. “For Anthony to get the therapy that he needed, I would have to leave my job four days a week and take him out of school, and there was just no understanding or compassion about that.”

Hoel said he and Mason are committed to hiring therapists who are engaged and passionate about their work and appreciate a multidisciplinary approach. “I wanted a place where the PTs talk to the OTs and the SLPs (speech-language pathologists), and they understand those kids, so they can treat the whole kid,” he said.

When Anthony did his occupational therapy first – before physical therapy — the therapists “were able to get him all regulated, if you will, and he’d be so much more cooperative in physical therapy, and he’d be able to maximize that session,” Hoel said. “And there were no silos. All those therapists would be working together in that one space — you know, talking to each other.”

Recognition for hard work

Every May, the center hosts its annual awards ceremony – an event inspired by Anthony, who died in 2011 at the age of 22.

“I was putting him and his younger brother, Matt, to bed one night,” Hoel said. “Matt had played soccer that day and got a trophy, and Anthony, who was 12 years old at the time and still struggling with walking, said ‘Dad, when can I get a trophy like Matt’s?’ I just kind of melted. I don’t remember what I said, but I thought a lot about it afterwards. I would see Anthony in therapy, and they really worked him. I mean, he had sweat coming down his face, and they’re working him up and down the hall, and I thought, ‘You know, these kids work really hard, but they don’t receive the recognition, or, honestly, the celebration, and neither does the family that supports and is bringing their child here.’”

The awards ceremony has grown so large that it has to be held in two different venues: Lake Middle School in Woodbury and the Bloomington Center for the Arts. “It’s almost like a high-school graduation,” he said. “We had 500 in attendance this past round. We invite all the kids who have graduated from therapy or are still in therapy to come out and celebrate.”

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Attendees are asked to RSVP. Once, a family RSVP’d for 12 people, he said. “They’re bringing brothers, sisters, grandmas, grandpas, you name it,” he said.

During the ceremony, children’s names are called, and they walk or roll down the aisle to the stage to receive their award. “Some struggle, but they’re able to make their way down that aisle, and they collect their certificate and their trophy,” he said. “They take a picture with their therapist, and they are just beaming. We would hear stories afterwards about how the child slept with their trophy, how they took it to school for show-and-tell or whatever…”

“It’s one of the best days of their life,” Mason said.

“And we get to recognize and celebrate what they’re doing,” Hoel said.

A lot of need

Hoel and Mason, who live in Hudson, Wis., met and married later in life. Between them, they have five children, four of whom are still living. Those who are living have various challenges, ranging from physical- to mental-health disorders, she said.

“We have felt firsthand the heartbreaks and stress in standing by, unable at times to help our children,” Mason said. “For the majority of our families that we work with, it is a very stressful world, and there are a lot of challenges.”

The challenges have grown over the past few years with an uptick in developmental delays and challenging behaviors in children post-pandemic, according to Mason.

“There’s a lot of need right now,” she said. “Everybody knows all the delays from COVID that the kids experienced – social delays, when they were doing distance learning and telehealth, and their motor skills are delayed because they weren’t in school, and they weren’t using their hands, and they weren’t doing motor play.”

The center’s mission is to provide hope and improve lives. “We never give up,” Mason said. “You’ve got to keep fighting in the hardest cases. You’ve got to have grit, and you’ve got to work.”

Justin and Cindy Burg, of Oakdale, credit the center with helping their daughter Ava, 9½, learn to walk. Ava had a stroke while in utero, and was diagnosed at the age of 1 with a mild form of cerebral palsy.

“We were concerned at first that she might not walk because she wasn’t progressing like we knew she should be,” Cindy Burg said.

Ava, a fourth-grader at Eagle Point Elementary School, took her first steps at the Family Achievement Center in Woodbury when she was 18 months old.

“I was in the room when it happened,” Cindy Burg said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ They came and grabbed me. We were trying to work on separating from me, so she would concentrate more, rather than looking at mom, but they came and got me. She was standing, and she took, like, four steps, and I just lost it. It was a great feeling.”

Ava is currently working with a speech therapist at FAC to manage a stutter, she said.

“I just remember her being so little and them really trying to just work with her and giving her a chance, not knowing what her future would be,” she said. “She can do everything now. They have helped us overcome so much. It’s just a miracle.”

Move to Your Own Groove fundraiser

  • What: Fifth annual Move to Your Own Groove All Abilities Run, Walk & Roll. The event has three race distances (50M, 1K and 5K), and participants can walk, run or roll.

  • When: 9:30 a.m. Sept. 10

  • Where: Colby Lake Park, Woodbury.

  • Cost: $25 per adult and $20 per child. All proceeds go to Family Achievement Foundation, the nonprofit arm of FAC founded in 2020.

  • More information: familyachievement.com/groups-events

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