Turning Winds seeks to turn young hearts and minds toward a brighter future. We believe that creating relationships is key to success in life. At our residential treatment center, we challenge each student to achieve personal excellence in academics and communication as they become self-directed and continue on their path of growth and achievement.
HIGH-QUALITY ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE
We offer a high-quality academic experience for each teenage student. As clients in a residential treatment center with a strong academic program, they are provided with a highly individualized educational experience.
Turning Winds provides a variety of teaching and learning opportunities such as experiential learning, leadership development, career planning, field trips, technology integration, as well as additional educational activities and resources that we integrate to support student learning.
Our goal is to provide every student with the education and support they need. We work closely with the counseling departments of our clients’ previous schools to fill in any gaps in their current educational path.
SUPPORTING IEPs
Sometimes students come to us with existing individualized educational plans (IEPs) or suffer from various learning disorders. Our experienced teaching staff will work with our clinicians to help treat learning disorders within the classroom and support any IEPs through every stage of our residential program.
Our teachers are fully credentialed and bring extensive experience to their roles. One of them is science teacher Cathy Miller. “There is specialized training for working with young people who have ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder),” she says. “That’s where the IEPs come in and we bring in special educators—they help the regular teachers. I have tools I’ve learned through my years of teaching, but I haven’t been specifically trained with the different learning disabilities that some students have. So, our special educators come alongside us and help us understand what we could do to make our instruction more effective.”
SMALL CLASSES
Our team promotes an optimal learning environment for each student to thrive. We offer small class sizes of 8–12 students to allow our teachers to spend the individual time needed with each student.
“We try to spread the kids out as much as possible so we can have small classrooms,” says Miller. “The other day we had two special education teachers in addition to the regular teaching staff. They pulled the kids on IEPs out, worked with them separately, tested them, and checked their progress. It was just beautiful to see how that worked. That’s what we’re aiming for here at Turning Winds.”
Many students who come to Turning Winds have been underachieving in their previous academic environment and through our program emerge in a place set up for success. We have 98 percent of our teens go on to college or trade school, and our students have even gone on to attend some of the top universities in the nation.
“We aim to meet the needs of each student where they’re at—supporting IEPs is part of that,” says Miller. “The key to success is identifying the students who can be pushed harder and the students that need a lot of hand-holding because we do have students who need to catch up. We also have students who are very capable and need to be pushed. And so there’s a lot of on-the-spot analysis of how they’re doing, reading their moods, and reading any propensity to just be lazy as opposed to prompting them to think and work.”
A DEDICATED TEAM OF SPECIALISTS
At Turning Winds, it’s the people who make the difference. Over two decades, we’ve built a dedicated team of some of the world’s finest academic and therapeutic professionals, all of whom share the same goal: to help teens re-engage meaningfully with their lives, families, and futures.
Our mission is to rescue teens in crisis, 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 possible.
