Children’s Miracle Network Miracle Kids

In December 2020, Kennedy Shallal, a typically energetic and happy four-year-old, began showing signs of unusual fatigue, strange bruises, and a persistent nosebleed. Her concerned parents took her to Corewell Health Children’s, where she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The following chemotherapy and hospital visits were challenging, exacerbated by COVID restrictions, but the care teams at the Skandalaris Family Center for Children with Cancer and Blood Disorders and the Proton Therapy Center provided comfort. Therapy dogs Olive and Millie brought Kennedy immense joy, easing her through grueling treatments. Kennedy’s twin sister, Regan, also cherished time with the therapy dogs once COVID restrictions eased. Kennedy has been in full remission since April 2023 and, inspired by Olive and Millie, she, and Regan plan to own an animal shelter and raise therapy dogs to help other kids. Today, Kennedy is now a happy and healthy 8-year-old.

Corewell Health’s Beaumont Children’s is excited to announce the 2024 Children’s Miracle Network Child Ambassadors for Beaumont Children’s: 11-year-old Braylen Watson and 10-year-old Rylee Watson, of Southfield. The siblings will serve as patient ambassadors for Beaumont Children’s to help raise awareness for pediatric initiatives across Southeast Michigan.

Braylen was two pounds and one ounce at birth. At age two, he couldn’t use his words to explain himself and instead used hand gestures that only his mother could understand. He grew increasingly frustrated, and at age three, was diagnosed with severe receptive and expressive language delay.

In March 2016, Braylen was enrolled in Beaumont Children’s RE/MAX Communication Preschool, a program designed to meet the needs of children who are diagnosed with speech or language difficulties in a school-based environment.

Through various therapies, Braylen gradually began finding his voice and expanding his ability to connect with others. He started to flourish academically and socially, embracing all that life has to offer. Despite his challenges, Braylen exudes an immense love for playing and exploring the world around him.

At the age of four, Rylee faced challenges in communicating her thoughts and feelings. She began receiving speech services from Beaumont Children’s and was diagnosed with severe mixed receptive and expressive language disorder. Upon her diagnosis, she was also enrolled in Beaumont Children’s RE/MAX Communication Preschool.

With the support of family, friends, speech therapists and professionals at the Beaumont Children’s RE/MAX Communication Preschool, Rylee made remarkable strides in overcoming the challenges posed by her language disorder. Her journey is one of triumph and inspiration.

Braylen and Rylee’s experiences have made them both compassionate, caring individuals that are looking forward to their ambassadorship where they will help other children find their inner strength and voices.

Beaumont Children’s is the only Children’s Miracle Network Hospital in Southeast Michigan. Through this 35-year partnership, more than $80 million has been raised to support children’s programs, including the Beaumont Children’s RE/MAX Communication Preschool. Support is also given to pioneer new health care solutions and to provide access to the latest research and technology for children.

The success of the Beaumont Children’s/CMN partnership relies upon the generosity of the entire community, including support from corporate partners, individuals and Corewell Health team members. Corporate partners often reach out to their employees and customers through retail promotions, generating donations gathered one dollar at a time. Major corporate partners include: Speedway, Costco, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Rite Aid, Ace Hardware, RE/MAX, Panda Express, Dairy Queen and Marriott International.

My son Max is 8 and has high-functioning autism, sensory processing disorder, and is socially and emotionally delayed. He was diagnosed in April/May of 2019.

We first saw red flags before he started preschool. When we met with his teachers, we shared our concerns, but we all collectively thought it was because Max is an only child and hasn’t been around many other children his age. We thought that eventually, he’d grow out of the issues we saw. As school went on, we saw there were no changes, and in fact, the issues got worse. It was causing havoc within our home life and school life as well. Max’s teachers saw it too.

I went to his primary doctor with our concerns for possible ADHD, but he recommended we see a physician that specialized in these types of behaviors. That’s how we found the Center for Exceptional Families.

At CEF, we met the fabulous and amazing Dr. Susan Youngs. She sat on the floor and interacted with Max during numerous appointments while we tried to figure out what was going on with our son. She told us she saw the red flags and was concerned about autism. She said with the spectrum being so large that there were various symptoms that could fall under the diagnosis, but most importantly, she could see what we were seeing. From that point, Dr. Youngs set us up for regular visits with her along with visits to a child psychologist and nutritionist at CEF. They evaluated Max on several occasions to be sure to get a full picture of his symptoms. After his last evaluation, they officially diagnosed him with high-functioning autism, social and emotional delays, and sensory processing disorder. Immediately after his diagnosis, Dr. Youngs gave us a treatment plan and her recommendations for what Max needed based on the team’s observations.

Max participates in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), speech therapy, and occupational therapy to help him with his challenges. These include sharing, conversation skills, self-regulating emotions, recognizing and reacting to others’ emotions, fine motor skills, higher critical thinking and adapting to change. Things such as these can make every day a struggle and can cause a meltdown for him in his world. We also participate in parent training to help us understand what he’s learning and how we can help.

Since Max has been in therapy, he has overcome so many challenges. His conversation skills are much better, and he can console others when they’re having a hard time. He’s starting to be a little more open-minded to change and we’ve been able to decrease his sessions since he’s reaching so many goals and targets. To see Max thriving in areas he once struggled with warms my heart. Max recently started karate to help with focusing and self-discipline and he loves it!

Hi, my name is Holly Soper and I would like to start by thanking everyone for participating today and taking time away from your busy schedules, to help support this amazing fundraiser. I know these days, our lives can be chaotic and very busy. So, we appreciate everyone here.

Also, a special thanks goes out to RE/MAX Nexus along with everyone else that helped put on such a wonderful event. Last year, they raise $40,000 at this event. That money goes directly to scholarships for local children to attend the RE/MAX Communication Preschool at Beaumont Children’s in Royal Oak for an entire year. The money raised will fund nearly 13 scholarships. Scholarships for children who struggle to communicate and often have multiple medical issues. Being able to articulate how they are feeling, what they are feeling and being heard and understood means more than anything to them and their families.

This preschool is not your typical school for 3 to 6 years old’s because it only accepts students who have been diagnosed with moderate to severe speech or language impairments. This preschool is amazing because they have a speech and occupational therapists in class to assist the teacher. Also, the teacher, Mrs. Beth, is one of the most kind hearted and patient person you will ever meet. Mrs. Beth loves these children and works so hard with each student to help improve their communication. Mrs. Beth and the specialized therapist at this preschool are amazing and they have all helped my daughter more than I could ever imagine. This is why many parents travel between 30 to 50 minutes to come to this specialize speech school.

This is an incredible school and I would like to share my daughter’s story with you today, just to give you the perspective of some of the children that go to this school. My daughter Everly is 5 years old and has been going to this awesome preschool for the last 18 months. Everly is one of the students who will benefit from the money raised today. So, I just wanted to thank everyone for participating today.

Everly has had a difficult childhood with many heartbreaking moments. The first of which came when Everly 18 months because she was diagnosed with moderate to severe speech delay. At the time, we knew Everly was behind on her speech milestones but everyone was telling us just to be patient because her speech will come along. Nevertheless, we didn’t want to delay Everly’s care, so we enrolled her in group speech therapy classes when she was 18 months. After a few months of group speech therapy, we noticed that other students were progressing faster than Everly. So, we enrolled her in private speech therapy to help her make more progress with her speech.

At 2 years old, Everly was going to group speech therapy once a week in addition to private speech therapy twice a week. With Everly going to speech 3x a week, we began to start seeing her make some progress with her speech. However, Everly’s speech therapist kept telling us that she has low muscle tone in her mouth which was contributing to her speech difficulties. Her speech therapist explained to us that this was making it difficult for her to fully articulating the words she was trying to pronounce. Around that same time, we realized that Everly was walking a little unusual. So, we decided to take her to get evaluated by the physical medicine doctor to help explain Everly’s low muscle tone and the way she walked.

This is when we had our next heartbreaking moment in Everly’s childhood because we were expecting the physical medicine doctor to tell us nothing is wrong with her. However, to our shock, the physical medicine doctor pre-diagnosed her with cerebral palsy but ordered an MRI of her brain to see if she had any brain damage.

When we got the results back from the MRI, it did not show any noticeable brain damage, which we were happy to hear. However, the physical medicine doctor wanted to get a more detailed MRI of Everly’s brain and spine because he thought that there could be a syrinx in Everly’s spinal cord, which could be contributing to Everly’s low muscle tone symptoms. Unfortunately, this was in March 2020 and that is when everything got shutdown because of covid. This was a very stressful time for us because not only were we dealing with the unfolding pandemic, we were also patiently waiting for the hospital to schedule her second MRI which took an extra two months to get the MRI scheduled.

After a very long two months, we were finally able to schedule Everly’s second MRI. That MRI revealed that Everly had Chiari malformation and syringomyelia. The neurosurgeon recommended decompression brain surgery to help relieve some pressure in Everly’s brain because it could help improve her symptoms of low muscle tone (in her mouth and body) in addition to potentially preventing further neurological damage. The surgery was a success, but the recovery was tough. Everly had to spend 2 days in the ICU and another 4 days in the hospital.

Everly’s speech did improve shortly after surgery, but we noticed that she was still having difficulties speaking. That is when her speech therapist diagnosed her with apraxia of speech, which is when the brain struggles to develop plans for speech movement. Everly can hear the difference between words and thinks she is pronouncing the words correctly when she tries to say them. However, the words do not always come out right because Everly’s brain has difficulty coordinating the proper muscle movements to say different words. It was heartbreaking to learn that Everly had apraxia of speech because that is when I realized that this will be a life long struggle for her. There is no cure for apraxia of speech, the only treatment available for this is intensive speech therapy.

Around that time, I heard about this special speech preschool in Royal Oak that came highly recommend from two high school friends, Jacob Thompson and Meg Simns. Jacob Thompson knew about the preschool because he is part of Remax First and has done charitable events for the preschool before. Meg Simns had taken her son to the preschool and had nothing but positive experience with everyone involved with the preschool. After that, we got Everly evaluated to see if she would be a good student for the school and we were very excited when she got accepted. When Everly started at the preschool, her vocabulary included around 150 words – compared to a typical 3 year old that should be using around 250 to 500 words.

Everly has made amazing progress since starting at this school and loves seeing her new friends every school day. Everly has been going to this preschool for about 18 months and is now commonly using 5 to 6 word sentences. Everly’s pronunciation has also improved and she talks more clearly now. Everly has also found new ways to explain to us what she is trying to say instead of just repeating the same word over and over if we are having trouble understanding her.

Everly has a very busy schedule for a 5 year old, she attends this preschool 2 days a week in addition to attending kindergarten on the other 3 days a week and also private speech therapy twice a week. After Everly was diagnose with apraxia of speech, we purchased an AAC communication device which is an iPad that is customize to help Everly communicate. So, instead of other kids only having to worry about speaking verbally, Everly also has to learn how to navigate her AAC device in addition to trying to speak verbally.

There are a lot of heart-breaking moments that come along with having a child with a speech disability. Knowing that Everly doesn’t have a normal childhood like the other kids who could be off on play dates or at the park. Instead, Everly is busy going from one therapy session to the next or at other doctor appointment to get another evaluation. Another heart-breaking moment is when Everly gets really upset and says while crying “Why you no understand me”, which just breaks my heart.

Hearing other children her age being able to speak in full sentences while Everly struggles to pronounce certain words is very tough as a parent. The worst part is knowing that Everly knows that she is different and not like other children. I also worry about that her speech will never get to where it needs to be and she will have to continue to go to speech therapy or use her communication device as an adult. Then, I worry about, how will this affect her self-esteem or impact her ability to have a successful life and if this could hold her back from getting a powerful position at a great business. Also, I worry about other children and adults treating Everly different because of her speech disability because this is not her fault, and that just breaks my heart.

Everly is such a strong, intelligent, and determined little-fighter who is a force to be reckon with. She loves to learn, to joke, and do gymnastics. And boy does she know what she wants and won’t ever back down. I hope that she will always have these qualities as an adult.

Everly has taught us so much. One, being different is an amazing thing, which has taken us on a different journey than most. She has taught us to always be kind, understanding, and patient with others. She has taught us to be appreciative of the little things, like when she says “love you ma”. She has taught us to be tough, fight for what is right and what we believe in for ourselves and others who aren’t able to do it for themselves.

And one of the most important is acceptance. Accepting the things that are out of our control. Accepting others for who they are and try to learn from their struggles instead of judging. And to never give up and always fight for what you want. I also hope that one day Everly will realize how far she has come and how much she has accomplished and how much hard work she has done.

And with that, I leave you with this. “Helping one person may not change the world, but it could change the world for one person.”

You have no idea how much everyone here helped with changing the life of all the children that go to this preschool. So, thank you.

Michelle Anderson
Director senior, operations and finance

Corewell Health Foundation Southeast Michigan
Board of Directors – 2025

Warren Rose, Chair
Laurie Cunnington, Vice chair
Ryan Daly, President

Stuart Blanck
Donald Conn, M.D.
Matthew Denenberg, M.D.
Geoffrey Hockman
Mary Kosch
Neelam Kumar, M.D.
Lisa Phillips
Robert Rosowski
Edward Russell
Karen Colina Wilson Smithbauer
Howard Wolpin
Ryan Daly (ex-Officio)
Lamont M. Yoder, RN (ex-Officio)