About Us

 

ReLife School is a program of Puget Sound Educational Service District designed to address the academic and behavioral needs of students (Grades 2 - 12) with significant social, emotional and behavioral disabilities.  The program employs a strong focus on the individual academic growth of students. Through efforts to improve our 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 seek to create a safe and structured environment for students to learn skills and strategies for coping with the stresses of daily life and to replace inappropriate behavior with socially adaptive behavior. We do this through a combination of in-class lessons, modeling and reinforcement, individual, group, and family therapy and through individualized interventions. Our goal is to transition each student from the program to the larger world, be it their neighborhood school, a job site, or post-secondary education, with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate that world successfully.

Our core values include safety, respect and responsibility. These form the backbone of our level system and behavioral expectations for students. Each student will learn skills and strategies that will allow them to be physically, socially, and psychologically safe. They will learn to demonstrate respect for themselves and others. All students will learn to demonstrate 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 take these instructional priorities very seriously and design all of our programming with them in mind. We also believe our students need to experience joy and laughter. We strive to make their learning enjoyable.  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 co-op program, meaning districts elect to join the cooperative and participate by sending their students to our program. School districts participate actively in the governance of the program and are essential to the success of their students. It is a shared goal upon intake that the student will transition to a less-restrictive setting based on the resources available within each school district.