The “Five Pillars of Change” are the foundation for all services at Turning Winds. The Turning Winds team believes that treatment success is most likely to be achieved through a combination of therapeutic and educational approaches that together provide the best outcomes possible for each troubled teen treated.
CHARACTER AND LEADERSHIP
A strong character acts as a vital anchor in the sea of life. It helps struggling teens grow to be consistent and stand strong against the pressures they face each day. We model strength-based self-management through our character/leader education curriculum allowing the culture in our residential treatment center to help facilitate positive change. Learning to manage self through character education brings the stability teens need for long-term success.
One way to build character is to be immersed in different cultures and help people less fortunate than ourselves. Such experiences afford visitors new perspectives and the ability to learn that all people are essentially the same.
Turning Winds organizes international service trips abroad for our clients twice a year. The trips are always uplifting therapeutic experiences since they involve helping others. Two years ago, Turning Winds clients and their chaperones visited a remote village in Guatemala.
“The primary purpose of the trips is to put together meaningful opportunities for the kids to get outside of themselves and give to other people,” explains chief operations officer Carl Baisden who organized and supervised this service trip. “We picked a Mayan mountain village. This trip was particularly meaningful to most participants,” says Baisden for whom it was very impactful from a service standpoint. “I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was such a remote village.”
This is the most powerful aspect of service work: the ability to expose Turning Winds clients to the life experiences of people in foreign cultures. While the Turning Winds visitors may act as helpers, it is the people being helped who become the teachers of this crucial lesson.
Goal setting is another cornerstone of the services provided at Turning Winds. “We’re all about our students having goals,” says clinical director Jared Sartell, LCSW. “Our system is designed for them to have their own goals that we are promoting toward their mental and emotional health.”
Another motivational element of our therapeutic approach is the STARS Program. It represents different mile markers our teenage clients can achieve. The Stars Program is all about promoting change. The mountaineering-inspired markers our teens can achieve are called Start, Trail, Approach, Ridge, and Summit. “The pinnacle of Turning Winds is also meant to be the pinnacle of their therapeutic process,” explains clinical director Jared Sartell, LCSW. “We have five levels. The fifth level is called ‘Summit’ and it is purely optional. About ten percent of our students achieve that level.”
Teens who embrace character as a foundational part of their life experience reduce the intensity and frequency of maladaptive behaviors, episodes of acting out, impulsive actions, and destructive tendencies, as well as a reduction of inappropriate peer relationships.
HEALTH AND WELLNESS
Turning Winds places a high priority on health, wellness, and fitness. This focus has consistently produced positive outcomes in our clients’ self-worth, energy, drive, and mental health.
Through the use of a nutritionist and our medical staff, our students receive a healthy diet based on their individual needs. Our students receive routine health evaluations and have the opportunity to voice any concerns they may have. As Turning Winds students become physically healthy they can invest more of themselves emotionally, therefore engaging fully in the therapeutic process. Health, wellness, and fitness are important tools we use to help facilitate change at our therapeutic school with the teens we work with.
Our teens not only learn about the importance of nutrition and exercise as key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle—they also live it. The Turning Winds campus lends itself to a multitude of fitness and adventure education activities. Our students engage routinely in team sports, individualized fitness routines, and outdoor experiential education as part of our school curriculum. Summer activities include volleyball, basketball, softball, swimming, weight training, aerobic exercises, mountain biking, yoga, and backpacking. In the winter, activities include snowshoeing, skiing, and occasional ice-fishing trips on weekends.
EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION
Turning Winds uses the outdoors to combine adventure therapy, experiential education, and psycho-educational therapy. Experiential learning is based on the belief that lasting change occurs when people are placed outside familiar situations of comfort and immersed in new and unique circumstances. In this way, students are participants rather than spectators and learn to appreciate the power of the great outdoors on our beautiful school campus.
The vehicle to connect our students with the outdoors and the therapeutic experience of nature is the Turning Winds Recreation and Education Connection (TREC). Through TREC our students experience first-hand activities such as backcountry hiking, backpacking, mountain bike riding, white water rafting, fishing, snowshoeing, skiing/snowboarding, cross-country skiing, and many other activities. Each activity is a therapeutic tool we use to teach important life lessons such as endurance, teamwork, mental strength, and many others.
EVIDENCE-BASED CLINICAL CARE
Turning Winds embraces a clinically driven, multi-disciplinary, and individualized therapeutic approach. Our licensed professional clinicians assess each teen and help students and their families to identify issues and then develop individualized goals and objectives designed to guide the change and personal growth process.
This therapeutic process is enhanced by engaging weekly in individualized therapy with a licensed clinician who is focused on the teen’s emotional growth, helping them achieve their clinical goals. We also utilize group therapy and psycho-educational group activities as an integral part of the therapeutic process. Group therapy sessions are facilitated by professional staff and are designed to address the primary emotional and social issues our teen boys and girls routinely face. These group therapy sessions are also used to address and facilitate clinical issues that have manifested during the therapeutic process.
ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE
Parents who consider sending their children to treatment for a mental health condition or substance misuse are often concerned about the impact of such a decision on their children’s education. Their kids are most likely already struggling at school and they fear taking them out of school and sending them to Turning Winds will interrupt the compromised academic career even more.
The opposite will happen. At Turning Winds, their children will catch up academically while also receiving treatment services. As a residential treatment center with a strong academic curriculum, Turning Winds offers a full continuum of care for teens with mental health issues while they also progress in their school curriculum. Our clients achieve success through a combination of therapeutic and educational approaches that provide the best possible outcomes.
Our teachers are fully credentialed and have extensive training and experience. One of them is science teacher Cathy Miller. She can apply more than twenty years of teaching experience to bring excellence into the academic portion of Turning Winds.
“Most of our students come in with gaps in their education, simply because they haven’t been consistent in their school attendance,” explains Miller. “We identify those gaps and immediately start filling in the holes.”
Often, that means doing a lot of catch-up work, especially in math and science. “Toward the end of their time here, we work closely with the parents to make sure they are ready for wherever they’re going back to when they transition out,” says Miller. “We often also talk with the school they’re moving to, giving them everything they need to be prepared.”
On average our students earn a GPA of 3.5 while here, and in 12 months our average student completes about 1.5–2 years of school while experiencing a GPA increase of almost a full letter grade compared to their GPA before coming to Turning Winds.
A UNIQUE HYBRID MODEL
We have taken the best elements of care from wilderness therapy, therapeutic boarding schools, and inpatient treatment to create a one-of-a-kind residential treatment center.
Our goal is to make sure every student gets the education and support they need for success. We work closely with the counseling departments in every student’s previous school to fill in any remaining gaps in their current educational path. We have an incredible educational team that specializes in working with teens who need specialized support with an IEP or working with those students who need an advanced curriculum.
Over the past two decades, Turning Winds has been able to help hundreds of families overcome what seemed impossible odds. Our mission is to rescue teens from crises, renew their belief in their potential, reunite them with their families, and put them on a sustainable path to success.
Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380. If your call isn’t answered personally, one of us will get back to you as soon as we can.
