Student Life

Cedar Ridge Therapeutic  School cultivates relationships and personal growth in all aspects of our milieu. We live, work, and play with a design toward helping our students differentiate into confident, capable young adults.

Live
Students live in family-style dorms that house 12-16 students each. They share rooms, homes, and chores in the spirit of a family so that they can maintain the changes when they return to your family.

As part of the therapeutic milieu, students who share a dorm home participate in a therapist-led group called family meeting twice each week to cultivate their relationships in their homes.

Work
In the campus family, students in our therapeutic school help maintain the campus and learn discipline and work ethic by participating in organized work projects. These work projects include regular household chores, landscaping, construction, animal care, gardening, and community service.

Play
As students demonstrate therapeutic progress, they earn increasing freedom to participate in social activities, including trips to town for a movie or bowling, and coed clubs in the school. Students also have the opportunity to participate and travel for team sports.

Trust Levels
Cedar Ridge cultivates change partly through the support system of trust levels. We designate these levels as ‘trust’ levels because they reflect the student’s trust in themselves, the trust of their peers, and the trust of the milieu staff. Levels range from 0 to 900 in increments of 100. New students begin in the middle at level  400 and can advance to level  500 as soon as they have mastered a small student manual. They can move up or down, depending on behavior and attitude. The higher the student’s level, the more privileges the student has.