Spring Creek Lodge Academy, a boarding school in Thompson Falls, offers troubled teens a chance to paint a brighter picture for their futures
By JOHN STROMNES of the Missoulian
THOMPSON FALLS - Students at Spring Creek Lodge Academy had a busy month in July, which traditionally is celebrated as Spirit Month at the residential boarding school for troubled teens near Thompson Falls.
Spirit Month activities keep up morale during the summer, when peers back home are logging time on videos games and lounging around or looking for trouble. Meanwhile, Spring Creek students are marching in formation to and from classes, meals and activities, supervised and instructed on about a 4-to-1 ratio of teachers, therapists and staff per student.
"These kids need a lot of structure, and they get it," said Spring Creek art teacher Jacqueline Rutzke of Thompson Falls.
To fight off the summer doldrums, students try everything from water balloon fights to milk-jug raft races to a roast pig supper with a whole pig cooked overnight in a pit - luau-style - on campus by none other than Sanders County Sheriff Gene Arnold and his wife, Edraline, a native Hawaiian Islander.
All the activities are supervised and structured for the students' academic and social development.
But for many of the youths, the high point of Spirit Month came last week with Rutzke's Spirit Month unit, "Mandala Sidewalk Art."
A mandala, in Rutzke's view, is a circular design that symbolizes relationships of living beings. It is characterized by radial symmetry and skillful use of color to express relationships. While it is common in Buddhist cultures, where it serves as an aid to meditation and a direct connection with the godhead, "the principle of this sort of ritualized art is present in cultures new and old, all over the world," she said. "Hindu, Christian, South American, native North America - many artists working today incorporate mandalas in computer-generated art."
Here's how Rutzke incorporated the mandala concept into the Spring Creek curriculum, a disciplined, collaborative effort at creative self-expression disguised as a fun outdoor activity during Spirit Month.
First, some background.
There are about 450 students at Spring Creek, boys and girls, ages 14 to 18.
Students live in dorms with some 20 other students of their same sex and achievement level. They are members of these families of peer students during their entire stay at Spring Creek, which typically lasts about 12 months.
For the mandala project, every student designed a mandala on paper, following parameters outlined by Rutzke. Each then presented his or her mandala design to other students in the family. Each mandala was then voted on as most expressive of their relationships with one another, and other characteristics they share.
The top five in each family comprised the mandala team, and the participant whose design was selected as the top one in each family became team leader, with his or her design destined to become that family's 6-foot-diameter chalk-and-tempera installation on the concrete basketball court at Spring Creek. The basketball-tennis court area serves as the academy's public square, which everybody visits daily for exercise, relaxation and recreation.
Rutzke said the aim was to encourage students not only to express themselves creatively, but to collaborate with others, and to take a significant risk by displaying their creations in the public square.
"They are making their art really big and it's right there in a center of activity very exposed for everyone to see," she said.
Many of the designs employed common motifs - flowers, the sun, stars, Mother Earth.
But one interesting and somewhat foreboding conception included chains - that's right, chains - bisecting the outline of the mandala circle. The chains were painted in dark colors.
"Chains have to do with relationship issues," Rutzke said. "The chains are square. Square is static. They are saying it is very hard to get past these chains."
Some students used mostly pastel chalk. But one group emphasized intensely bright tempera colors - orange and red and green and blue.
"It's about us," said Julie Ann, a cheerful 16-year-old in one of the bright-mandala teams. '"We're bright, loving, colorful. The stars (around the perimeter of the mandala) are shining for us. We shine through no matter what darkness gets in our way."
"It's pretty, it's bright, it's unique to us," said Winnie, age 15.
There were, of course, some rules for mandala design and execution. Spring Creek, after all, is a highly regimented boarding school that demands respect for others and accountability for oneself - and conformance to rules, which really means respect for others.
Respect for others extends to other cultures.
That's why no yin-yang motifs were allowed, Rutzke said.
"They use yin-yang and don't have a clue to what it means (in Asian cultures). It would be disrespectful" to use it as a motif without appreciation of its cultural context, she said.
Two of the 20 mandalas produced last week had elements of design extending outside the 6-foot circle assigned as the mandala boundary.
"The rules never said they couldn't go outside of the circles with their designs," Rutzke said. "Only two teams came to me and asked if it is OK to paint outside the lines. Both of those teams were upper-level students. They have more confidence, and they have been in the program long enough to feel more secure and take that kind of risk, too."
Rutzke said teaching art at a residential high school for troubled teens has its unique challenges. But in many ways, it is far more rewarding than teaching in public schools, where students go home at night, are never around on weekends and take the entire summer off to do pretty much what they want.
At Spring Creek, students work intensively 12 months a year, seven days a week at their goal - to graduate from high school and return home.
"This kind of work is extremely rewarding. We get results from the kids much more quickly than in public school," she said.
Reporter John Stromnes can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or
[email protected]------------------------
This article is complete bullshit. Let JOHN STROMNES know how WRONG he is and easily SCL pulled the wool over his eyes. This guy is not a reporter, he is an idiot-- who writes what he is told-- without doing any investigation himself.
