Anything tht is deemed therapeutic counts, Anne. I'm sorry but those are the rules we are playing under. Some people don't like the rules and that's fine but they should start voting or try to change the laws. The schools are clean and we all know that. They operate under the rules. At my program when we were defiant and wouldn't do what the counselors told us to then they would give us what was called work assignments. Basically you had to take care of the grounds, mow, pick weeds, paint the director's fence and house, clean his bathroom, wash his car and boat, some light electrical and plumbing (nothing with a torch, of course lol) and any other facility type work that needed doing. By doing this work, our counselors taught us we were buying into the program. By doing this facility labor we were getting a kind of sweat equity in the facility. We could be proud that we took care of our own property and didn't have to go out and hire maintenence workers. We did it. We bought into the program by doing this labor and became less defiant and more open to the teachings of the program so we could get back on trak and become successful. Sometimes if there weren't any facility jobs that needed doing we would just move a big rockpile back and forth along this little runway. Move pile to one end, move pile to other end and repeat. The rocks were symbolic of our hard head that we had to carry around with us until we decided to let the staff start to change us for the better.
