Philosophy & Treatment

     Hillcrest Educational Centers, Inc. was founded on the belief that our students are unique individuals with specific needs. Accordingly, the fully integrated therapeutic, educational and residential programming we offer is tailored to enable students to both reach and use their true potential.
     Students are referred to Hillcrest Educational Centers when their behavior is severely problematic, self-defeating, and, sometimes, dangerous to the student and/or others. Therefore, our students require residential treatment in order to develop and learn to use self control, to change their behavior, and to grow psychologically and emotionally. Hillcrest's goal is to facilitate the social, emotional, intellectual, and physical growth of our students so that they will be able to benefit from, and do well in, less restrictive settings and eventually return to the community.
     The Hillcrest treatment approach is interdisciplinary and is grounded in cognitive-behavioral therapy. This means that we offer each student support from a combination of qualified professional and paraprofessional staff who are trained in the various techniques and skills required for that student's individual development and unique needs.

    Hillcrest provides clinical and medical services; counseling and therapy; special education; speech, language and hearing services; occupational therapy; recreation; and residential services. Regardless of the discipline involved, however, each Hillcrest staff works with each student on the behavior and the maladaptive thinking, belief and feeling patterns that have sabotaged his or her developmental progress.
     At Hillcrest, student services are delivered through a team model. Social workers, therapists, educators, psychologists, nurses, physicians, and other specialists all work together with the child care staff as a treatment team to serve a specific group of students who are assigned to that team. The team takes a pro-active, educative approach to helping the student change his/her problem behaviors and learn essential problem solving and social skills. All components of Hillcrest programs are fully integrated to maximize therapeutic engagement and opportunities for behavior change. The primary focus of our treatment is to enable the students to make choices that will enhance the quality of their lives, both in the present at Hillcrest and in the future as members of a community.
     At the time they are admitted, students are assigned a master level clinician on campus. The students participate in a variety of therapeutic activities, including Adventure Based Counseling, individual and group therapies, issue specific psychoeducational groups, expressive and play therapies. Case management services, consisting of family contact, coordination with all associated agencies, documentation, and scheduled, periodic, in depth reporting on student progress, are provided for each student.
    At Hillcrest we refer to the children we serve as students because we believe that all people can change and grow, that all people can learn. In that sense, we believe that we are all learners and we are all students. We learn from our work with students how to be better teachers and helpers, and sometimes, from the courage that our children and their families show as they struggle to learn and grow, we learn about courage.
     We call the children students because at Hillcrest each child will learn. He/she will learn new ways of thinking, feeling and acting; new ways to get along with others; new ways to get his/her needs met; and new ways of growing and succeeding in the world.

Family-Focused Treatment Philosophy

    With the primary goal of preparing students to function in a less restrictive setting and eventually return to the community, Hillcrest Educational Centers is committed to working collaboratively with student families. Our work is guided by the philosophy that it is in the best interest of children to grow up in a context of a caring family whether that is the child’s natural family or non-related or “elected” family. We also believe that if given the necessary guidance and skills, families have the capacity to work through traumatic experience and provide competent and non-abusive parenting.
    This goal can best be accomplished by creating a collaborative atmosphere that invites families to become active and supportive members of their child’s treatment, respects family belongingness in the context of major stress, welcomes cultural differences, appreciates the impact of socio-economic factors on family functioning and promotes the courage to change in our mutual struggle to improve the quality of our students’ lives.

• Facilitating the engagement of families during the entire course of a child’s treatment.
• Assessing family strengths and resources needed to ameliorate trauma and salient referral problems.
• Promoting re-unification or “step-down” to a less restrictive setting.
• Developing increased opportunities for therapeutic contact within the family, community and residential milieus.
• Providing educational forums to enhance awareness of issues that impact on child-family functioning and creating a support network with families, advocates and funding agencies.