About Us

ReLife School is a program of Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD), designed to support the academic and behavioral needs of students (Grades 2 - 12) with significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges.  The program focusses on the individual academic growth of students through efforts to improve students’ executive functioning, attention to detail, and social interactions. We engage students in appropriate study skills and assignment/project completion, resulting in their movement toward increased successful classroom experiences. We are a safe and structured environment in which students learn skills and strategies for coping with the stresses of daily life and are able to replace inappropriate behavior with socially adaptive behavior. We do this through a combination of in-class lessons, modeling and reinforcement, and through individualized interventions. Our goal is to transition each student from the ReLife program to the larger world, be it their neighborhood school, a job site, running start, or post-secondary education, with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate their future successfully.

Our core values include safety, respect, and responsibility. These form the backbone of our level system and behavioral expectations for students. Each student learns skills and strategies that allows them to be physically, socially, and psychologically safe. They learn to demonstrate respect for themselves and others along with increasing levels of responsibility to themselves, their peers, and their community. We achieve this through explicit and focused instruction and through daily modeling of these values for our students.

We also believe our students need to experience joy and laughter in their successes/growth and ensure that this is threaded into their learning. We strive for a relaxed and positive school climate. We have an incentive-based philosophy and believe that punishment is not a highly effective tool for behavior change. We create incentives for positive behavior and offer natural and logical consequences when difficulties arise. Students are expected to make amends as part of taking responsibility, and are sometimes not allowed to participate in certain activities when physical or psychological safety is a concern. We teach and re-teach expectations, have students reflect on their choices, and work to reset patterns of negative behavior.

ReLife is a cooperative program, meaning districts elect to join and participate by sending their students to the ReLife Program. School districts work with us and participate in the governance of the program and are essential to the success of their students. It is a shared goal upon every student intake that the student will transition to a less-restrictive setting, based on the resources available within each school district.