Mission

Transitioning students from a treatment environment back into society by creating opportunities for choice in order to assess progress and foster internal change.

Philosophy

All students possess a wealth of talents and aptitudes that are often ignored or overlooked. In order to help students harness this inner power, Mountain Springs is a non-traditional, structured boarding school that compresses outstanding teaching, life-changing experiences, and a powerful, individualized program (the MAPP plan) into a relatively short period of time (a minimum of six months) in order to transform students into powerful, leading individuals. Our leadership training, experiential emphasis, and individual attention are designed to take students to heights they previously believed to be impossible. Mountain Springs also takes advantage of its physical setting to provide students with a vast array of experiential learning opportunities and experiences that challenge their present paradigms.

At Mountain Springs (MSPA), we believe that a "step-down experience" needs to be one where students can practice skills and values they have learned in their prior treatment and sometimes even make mistakes. We expect to see the mistakes and problems that the students would have made had they gone home, here in this environment. The difference is that with the saftey nets and mentoring that our program provides, the repercussions of their actions are typically less severe but still give us a clear indication of where the student is at and what still needs to be worked on.

At MSPA, the outcome that we strive for is “value-governed behavior” meaning the student has internalized certain values (such as honesty, accountability, integrity, responsibility, etc.) and is choosing to live according to these. When this is the case, the student's behaviors are consistent, even when staff or other authority figures are not watching or the student may not get in trouble for their behavior. External structure (rewards, consequences, etc.) do not dictate the student's behavior as much as his or her internal values and morals do.