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By JOYANNA LOVE/ Managing Editor

The Wellness Group is preparing to build a new facility in Clanton.

Jared Hood of The Wellness Group shared the news of the upcoming move with the Clanton Kiwanis Club during a recent meeting.

“We have maxed the footprint of our office as much as you can possibly max it,” Hood said. “If you go by our office in the afternoon there is not a place to park anywhere.”

The Wellness Group has 11 therapists with another starting on Aug. 16.

The new location will be in front of Hatley Health Care with access off of Highway 145.

Designs have been complete, but a move-in date was not announced.

The Wellness Group provides counseling for children and adults.

“We do a little bit of everything,” Hood said. “We have counselors who are more specialized in certain things. Some of our counselors really enjoy working with little kids. Some of them prefer not to work with kids at all. Some of them like the teenage age group, and then some of us like adults … so we all have different specialties in what we like.”

The counselors that work with school-age children also visit the public schools.

“We try our best to match the counselor with the client,” Hood said, rather than assigning a counselor to a specific school.

However, counselors are often seeing multiple clients at one school while they are there.

Hood said The Wellness Group has had counselors meet with select students in the schools since 2008, but now a broader partnership has developed through COVID-related funding, allowing them to provide counseling to more students.

“We have always been able to do those one-on-one counseling (sessions), now these funds allow us to do way more than that, we can go in and do schoolwide assemblies, if the school identifies that there is a huge need that they feel like needs to be addressed,” Hood said.

Small group counseling and counseling for staff are other services that have been made available. Hood said the counseling service keeps confidential which staff members have contacted them.

“It is going to be an incredible thing for us as an organization to do that,” Hood said. “This is something that we are being able to give back to our community because this is where most of us live.”

He said this will also allow the counselor to provide services in a time of crisis at the school.