Here we provide what a prospective student’s parents may need to know, in general, about choosing a program for a struggling teenager. Here we also provide what they may want to know, more specifically, about the young people and parents who have already joined the Montana Academy community.
We urge that, before deciding to complete and submit an application, parents review this website’s comprehensive description of Montana Academy—its developmental and clinical programs, school, staff, students and families. To help parents gauge the fit between a teenager’s problems and the Academy’s programs, here we also sketch the Academy’s “typical” student and family, and describe the Academy’s admission criteria. To inform parents well ahead of time about relevant financial and insurance policies, we provide those key policies here.
When parents and consultants are confident that a place at MA may well make sense, they here may download an application check-list, which organizes the process; an application to be completed; associated consents and agreements; notice of , and review the Academy’s relevant policies, so as to complete and submit an application packet.
Once parents conclude that MA is a top choice for a therapeutic boarding school, then the admission process takes just four steps:
The screening call, usually conducted by an educational consultant, prevents wasted effort and time. For example, there may be no places available in the needed time frame, or only places for girls, or a place on a particular team that constrains which kind of clinical problem can or cannot be accommodated. When the prospects for admission are reasonably favorable, parents are invited to complete an application and schedule a visit—which typically happen while a struggling son or daughter completes a wilderness program. The application and a visit to the ranch provide bases for parents to determine, and also for the Academy’s clinicians to confirm, that there is a match between a family’s problem(s) and MA’s program(s).
If parents decide to proceed and the Academy’s senior staff concur, then a date is set for enrollment.
The purpose of the obligatory exploratory visit is to provide parents a basis for making an important decision in a teenager’s (and a family’s) life. The mutual interview at the heart of every parent’s visit is an opportunity to discuss problem(s) that parents hope the Academy can address and help to resolve. It is also a chance for parents and MA leaders to gauge the fit of the MA approach to the shape, size and acuity of a potential student’s problems. In the making of an accurate, mutually-agreed-upon appraisal, much is at stake for everyone involved: parents, a future student, and the whole ranch community, including other families.
To accomplish this mutual appraisal, this visit routinely involves key staff introductions, a tour of the working school (while classes are in session), a visit to the dormitories, the library, sports facilities, the shop, and the lodge. Parents then join a team table (students and staff) for lunch with the whole community. Students welcome prospective parents, ask about a prospective team-mate, and speak frankly, if asked, about what it has meant to them to be students at MA. By the end of this half-day on campus, most parents feel that they know pretty well whether the fit is right, and feel that they know pretty well the program, staff and other students at MA. They know pretty well whether their own son or daughter will thrive at the ranch. Also, by the end of that visit, MA’s experienced staff have a pretty good idea whether the fit will be comfortable and whether the family’s troubles are problems the Academy is likely to be able to help to resolve.
Please use the following directions to Montana Academy:
Directions to Montana Academy
Do not use the directions provided by MapQuest, Google Maps, car GPS systems, etc. We find that these directions are typically inaccurate.
There is no one type of MA student, albeit most students share some common attributes and predicates. All are teen-agers. All are high-school students. All MA students are bright, talented and full of promise. All of their families stand behind them, actively participate, and remain engaged in their children’s lives while they are students at MA.
Prior to enrollment all MA students experienced some kind of progressive, global breakdown. Repetitive and worsening symptoms, misbehaviors, problems and failures have touched most or all venues in their modern adolescent lives: at school, in extracurricular activities, at home, in the society of peers, and all by themselves. Attempts to resolve these problems while they continued to live at home—with good advice, competent outpatient psychotherapy and/or psychotropic medications—already had failed. The risk/ reward ratio became too great to continue on an outpatient basis.
Most students have completed a challenging wilderness program. All MA students are healthy and strong enough to participate in the Academy’s vigorous outdoor activities.
To join the community MA students have all met safety criteria. For a ranch has its limitations. MA is not a locked hospital ward, a boot camp or penal colony. Prospective student must demonstrate (e.g., at wilderness) an ability and willingness to cooperate, control themselves, and be careful about others’ well-being. Teenagers who need locked doors or physical restraint do not belong on a Montana ranch, where winter nights can be frigid and there are gas tanks, farm tools, kitchen knives, ropes and pine trees. MA does not enroll adjudicated delinquents, nor young people who are acutely suicidal, psychotic, assaultive, uncooperative, actively drug-seeking or determined to run away.
There is not any typical misbehavior, symptom or formal diagnosis shared in common among MA students. The campus is diverse in this way, as in other ways. Over the years young people have brought to MA more than fifty axis I DSM-IV diagnoses, a long cumulative list of symptoms and signs, and an imaginative variety of misbehaviors.
Notably, Montana Academy is not a primary alcohol or drug rehab. For this reason, MA does not accept teenagers who still avidly seek mind-altering substances, who remain determined to sneak drugs onto an open campus, and want to encourage or supply other students’ use. However, the Academy always has on campus many young people with substantial drug and alcohol use histories. This is hardly surprising, inasmuch as the use of mind-altering substances has become endemic in our society. For this reason, the Academy devotes significant time and considerable effort to an innovative addiction prevention program—an important aspect of the MA experience.
As a group MA parents are professionally diverse, but similarly well-educated. They hail from thirty states but share a warm, intelligent interest in healthy children.
The Academy selects parents as carefully as it chooses students. Insofar as MA has a choice, its leaders have been able to pick parents who take parenting seriously. As a group, these MA moms and dads have recognized that they need not blame themselves for all their daughters’ or sons’ problems, but nevertheless must see themselves as able and willing participants in their solution. They share a common impetus to help, to pitch in, to participate. They are routinely willing to reconsider, ready to be accountable, avid to learn, and open to doing things differently if they can see a better way.
These are not only self-interested contributions. For most MA parents, participation has not been confined to what their own families can gain. MA parents have been willing to join a community of mothers and fathers, to sustain a collective culture, to support the work the MA staff do with all the Academy’s students. They have encouraged one another with empathy, taught one another with tactful honesty, and have been affectionate and hopeful about each other’s children.
This has become a remarkable culture, which has a great deal to do with the Academy’s outcomes. For its own part, MA’s admissions leadership does its best, with every enrollment, to add newcomers to this parental community who are worthy of it, who will sustain its shared culture, who will be good neighbors in the village it takes to raise civilized adults.
Typically parents bring a daughter or a son to enroll at MA. On that day a new student, his parents, and the MA staff and students, have key tasks to accomplish.
For a new student, enrollment is a boggling series of friendly introductions: to senior staff, therapist, team-leader and mentor. In those first days a new student will receive a Student Handbook and an orientation, and his mentor will introduce him to the teachers, his team staff and other team-mates. The team-leader will check in a new student’s belongings, assign bed, and help her to join the team. Her therapist will set up a first individual therapy session and dedicate the first group therapy session to a warm welcome. At school a new student shadows her mentor until her Academic Advisor assigns her to her own classes. In the first week the Medical Director and Nurse meet with her to review medical problems and medications, if any.
For parents, enrollment involves a few equally-important tasks: an introduction to senior staff; a signing of consents, a delivery of records and a writing of checks; picture-taking; and a slow walk back to the car to help beloved child fetch a backpack and say fare-well.
While a son or daughter then goes off with team-leader and mentor to join a school and a student-body, parents stop in to provide base-line clinical ratings; consult with the Academic Advisor about classes and learning problems; meet with the Medical Director and Nurse to discuss health issues and medications, if any. And then they join the new therapist and clinical consultant (a senior clinician assigned to the team) for a relaxed conversation that is intended to help parents and key staff to get to know one another. The desired outcome of this final talk of the day is an incipient alliance, the start of a friendly collaboration.
At the end of the enrollment day, then, as they drive back over the ridge, parents should have a good feeling for the ranch community in which a beloved girl will now try to make herself at home. As they review the day, winging toward home, they should feel they know the leaders of the ranch community in which a much-loved boy will now try to make his way forward. In anticipation, even before they reach home to await that scheduled call with news from Montana, they should feel they already have a pretty good idea who will be holding the phone at the other end of the line.
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