by Matt Freeman
It’s the afternoon, classes at the Montana Academy are over for the day, and it’s time for work around the campus. Some young men are working in a pasture on what might delicately be termed a gopher abatement effort. They’re bright and funny, personable, hard-working. It’s like a prep school, is your first impression, transplanted to a ranch in Montana, filled with polite, well-off, intelligent, happy kids, lucky to be who they are.
Then, during a break, former IRA President and current Montana Academy director of education Carol Santa asks a question: “Andrew, why did you come here?” He looks down awkwardly. “To learn how to balance my life,” he murmurs. “Balance school. Family.”
That same afternoon, Santa encounters some parents who have come to look the place over. The mother, anguish in her eyes, says it’s hard, and Santa says she knows, but not to worry. “Let us do the worrying,” she says.
Dark clouds roll over the mountains in the west, and for a few minutes the campus is lashed with rain and hail. A short while later, a new student named Owen shows up, standing around uncertainly. Santa talks calmly to him, too. She tells him they’ll start him with Spanish—they like to start new students with Spanish, she says. He nods, not really looking at her. He doesn’t ask why.
Montana Academy is a therapeutic boarding school, and the kids who come to it travel a long road that starts with severe psychological problems and breakdowns in school performance and family functioning. About a third of the students, according to clinical director John Santa (Carol Santa’s husband), are failing to face school challenges—“they feel incompetent in the world,” he says. Another third are acting out—they’re angry, defiant, oppositional. The last third are anxious, depressed, withdrawn, suicidal.
On the trip to northwestern Montana’s Lost Prairie Valley, most of modern life falls away behind them. The trees, the rolling pastures, the mountains that rim them, the famously big sky—all that may be beautiful to outdoors-minded adults, but to an affluent teen, used to a life of privilege and pleasure seeking, it looks as barren and desolate as Siberia.
There are no televisions at Montana Academy, no radios, no Internet. One aim, Carol Santa says, is to quiet the students’ world down. Another, quite simply, is to bore them. For one thing, it gets them reading for entertainment. And the kids soon learn that Montana Academy does, in fact, offer a wide variety of interesting, fun activities—but they have to be earned—and that their new world offers beauty they will come to appreciate over time.
Some eight years ago, psychiatrist John McKinnon and psychologist John Santa tried to reorganize the state of Montana’s mental health provider system, only to see a managed care group brought in. Deeply frustrated, they bought the ranch three months later with what McKinnon calls the “vague idea” that they would treat depressed teens or something similar.
Today, McKinnon’s office is above the common dining hall and lounge. “There are 70 different stories down in that lounge this morning,” McKinnon says, but since the beginning, they’ve seen a pattern: The students who were sent to them were depressed, anxious, conflicted, bereaved. Divorce, death, adoption, drugs and alcohol, rape, sexual abuse, and a myriad of other catastrophes had severely disrupted the family’s functioning.
Another commonality they saw was a tendency to be narcissistic, self-centered, with little sense of empathy, no real understanding of how the present connects to the future, underdeveloped ethics, and a concrete thinking style. The students tended to lack the ability to care about abstractions such as the good of the family, the good of the community, honor, or trust.
McKinnon’s wife, Rosemary McKinnon, a psychologist, points out that all this is normal at certain early developmental stages, but not at 16 or 17. These kids’ traumas had stalled their growth. “We began to realize what we were looking at were developmentally delayed kids,” John McKinnon says. “We began to realize we were building a school to try and help kids grow up.”
The students needed two things, John McKinnon says. One was recognition, a sense of being understood in a generally positive way. “That, of course,” he says, “is what therapy is.”
The second was structure, limits. McKinnon says nobody had effectively said “no” to these kids before. “It’s a direct challenge to narcissism,” he says. This meant they would have to confront the students about misbehavior. “You can’t do that in outpatient therapy,” Rosemary McKinnon says, laughing, “because you’ve lost your client.”
The recognition and limit-setting had to take place over time. And that made a school setting a good place to see if the approach could work.
Then, as now, students come to Montana Academy through the recommendations of educational consultants who specialize in finding appropriate school settings. In the beginning, one of them told the planners, “If you do this, you’ll be unique in the country.”
John Santa says this was because at the time, around 1997, kids in psychological trouble might go first to a mental hospital, then to a residential program where education was an afterthought, not an emphasis.
They might also be sent to a military academy sort of school, where no attempt was made to understand their psychological issues. Or they might go to a school with what was called an “emotional growth” program, where a version of the encounter group approach was the main therapeutic component.
The approach taken by Montana Academy’s organizers—combining rigorous academics with intensive, individuated therapy by trained psychologists and psychiatrists—may seem like common sense, but it wasn’t common at the time. Today, the idea is catching on, in part being spread through a new group formed in 1999 called the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, Santa says.
Currently, this approach is only available to well-off families—an unhappy financial necessity at this point, the school’s directors say. For 70 students, there’s a staff of 60, with many expenses other schools don’t have. A year’s tuition at Montana Academy is US$66,000, and although not everyone pays that much, the expense is still considerable. “Kids don’t get sent here unless the parents are pretty desperate,” John Santa says.
Therapy and academics are not only equally emphasized, they’re swirled together. Phil Jones, a Montana Academy teacher, gives the example of an English class creative writing exercise in which students write a story based on the Iliad, then explain how the story relates to their own lives.
Everything that happens with students, good and bad, is communicated among the therapists and teachers, Jones says. The students are organized into small “teams” of peers with whom they spend a lot of time, including four weekly group therapy sessions. Within a day or so, relevant information about a student reaches everyone involved. “This is a fishbowl,” is how John McKinnon puts it.
As English teacher Jason Rasco winds up a class, one student stays to talk, concerned about falling behind. They discuss how to schedule other activities—“I’ve noticed you have a tendency not to say �no’ to things,” Rasco says—and several other ways the student could stay caught up.
Then a journalism class comes in. They make a joke now and then, but there’s a calm, professional mood to their work. The new issue will have world news, student-written essays, and news about school events, particularly about students who have moved up in the clan system.
Every student is put in the “earth” clan when he or she arrives. It’s deliberately made boring, and privileges are few. As they develop emotionally, they move on to the next stage—to the moon, sun, star, and finally sky clans. Privileges expand, options broaden. These steps are reported with some fanfare in the paper and are cheered in public ceremonies.
The clan news is on one page; on another there’s a student poem, “My First and Final Goodbye,” an intense description of how the author felt being left behind by his mother. Its last two lines read: “You’re gone now and/I still need to say goodbye.” There’s a photo paired with it that shows an aging outbuilding—not the whole structure, just a closed door.
“Relationships here are key,” Carol Santa says. “They’re not going to work for a teacher they don’t like.” Today, Lya Hardwicke, as well liked as anyone at the school, is getting her Spanish class off to a quick start. Mercurial jokes—she’s a natural comic—are mixed with serious reminders about manners and class rules. Every now and then she raises a warning eyebrow.
She teaches, she jokes, she monitors moods. One young woman explains that a classmate is anxious because she’s going off the site for a visit with her mother. Hardwicke uses it, writing ansioso, Spanish for “anxious,” on the board.
A student named Tyler is having a lot of trouble attending to the work. The phrase “Jennie es de Omaha” somehow launches him into a monologue about a song he likes. No eyebrow this time; Hardwicke’s eyes lock in a flash on his, her expression deeply intent.
“Tyler,” she says, interrupting him.
He keeps talking, explaining that he—
“Tyler.”
He subsides. “I’m focused,” he says quietly.
The class goes on, with Hardwicke tossing off compliments and criticism, monitoring emotions, answering the phone, offering learning strategies, passing along academic content and life lessons. You think of orchestra conductors. The class ends with two Spanish songs, and the kids go out laughing.
One Montana Academy feature that fits the setting is its experientials—engaging, confidence-building learning activities based in the real world, things like hiking, skiing, fishing, camping. Through these, students learn about the beauty and demands of nature, and the value of things that can’t be bought with money. Taking care of animals promotes responsibility—there are sheep and ducks on the campus, even a hamster called Godzilla, but the care and riding of horses are especially prominent activities.
It’s a rainy Thursday afternoon, and a drill team is practicing a precision riding routine in a covered arena, two groups of students confidently guiding their mounts in opposite circles. John Santa sets a booted foot on a fence rail and quietly mentions that one of them was once considered doomed to an institutionalized life. He watches them ride for a while, then speaks again.
“They’re beautiful kids, aren’t they?” he asks.
The dining hall is ringing with cheerful dinnertime noise, but psychiatrist Dennis Malinack is upset: there’s been a sudden added cost to a house he’s building. The subject changes, and his mood darkens further as he talks about kids misdiagnosed and given powerful drugs that can cause permanent damage. (John McKinnon says over 70% of the new students show up on medications.) Some need them and do well, of course, but many others simply don’t, and do fine—better, in fact—without them.
Then Malinack has a quick, cheerful chat with a young woman about a project she’s working on. She leaves, and he turns to look at the cheerful throng. He sits up straighter, he raises his head, he sweeps an arm around at them and asks whether the kids don’t seem happy. He looks a lot happier himself.
Earth, moon, sun, stars, sky—and eventually graduation. Students who have left Montana Academy and gotten on with their lives often stay in touch, John McKinnon says. They call him, and they send him photos, which he keeps pinned up in a long row above his desk. He points out one, a young man who had been severely depressed, and had made a nearly successful suicide attempt. But he graduated two years ago and is now writing a book about his illness with his mother, a Nobel Prize laureate.
The young man is smiling happily in the picture, and so are all the others in that long row. You look at them, and you can’t help thinking how good they look, how hopeful—intelligent, happy kids, lucky to be who they are.
Matt Freeman is managing editor of Reading Today.
Mountains and sky, by Matt Freeman. (2004, October/November). Reading Today, 22(2), 1, 20.
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