Cramer Creek is just celebrating its first year. The school is located about 30 minutes from Missoula MT, in a secluded valley that provides privacy as well as easy access to the University and all the activities of a small city. When I visited last year, all that was there was the beautiful environment with a little bit of ground breaking started.

Now, the buildings are completed and functional with 26 students living there, busy turning their lives around. I had a chance to visit with several of the students. They were polite and seemed realistic as to what was going on in their lives that got them enrolled at the school. From their stories, and interactions I saw while I was visiting, it was obvious many of them were still somewhat resistant to changing their negative thinking and despite progress in the program still had a long ways to go. Many seemed to be hard-to-work-with students, but it was obvious the school was being successful in working with them.

With the school having the run of the valley, students do a lot of stream fishing, mountain biking and a multitude of other outdoor activities in their free time. Every student is enrolled in the arts program because the school believes in art as a transformative activity essential to the emotional and spiritual growth of the students.
The program is based on Positive Peer Culture (PPC) where most interactions over problems are settled by the group. Staff members are involved mostly to make sure the interactions are positive without manipulation, hidden contracts or threats, etc. Their experience is, when the students learn that honesty works better than lip service or manipulation, healthy attitudes develop with a strong positive peer pressure dominating.

Most of each student's activities are within his/her group. Cramer Creek currently has four groups, three cottages for boys and one cottage for girls. Each group/cottage goes to classes together, eats meals together, and has regular groups together. There are limited interactions between the groups, so the basic experience of each student is within a small group of no more than ten students.

It was explained to me that the model for each student's academic experience is the old one-room schoolhouse. This means each student progresses academically at his or her own pace, with more advanced students helping those needing help. This helps the students because the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else. This dynamic is also very important in helping develop the cohesion of the group. Academic credits are awarded on a competency basis so a student behind his/her age group academically can, with effort, catch up to his peers.

One of the aspects of PPC is that when a problem develops, a student can call a group. Everything else is dropped and the group goes into a session to talk through the difficulty and find a resolution of the differences or negative behavior. I saw the start of one of these spontaneous groups while I was there. The girls had just sat down at their lunch table with their meals in front of them when all of a sudden they all got up, put their coats on and calmly filed out to go back to their cottage for group. I didn't hear the details, but they all filed back in later to resume eating lunch so I presume the issue had been resolved, at least for the time being.

Cramer Creek is maturing quickly for a new school just one year old. The physical plant is pretty much completed and functional, and the program is working. The only obvious thing left was the need for more landscaping. Based on the progress so far, I expect this to be fleshed out by the end of next summer.