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Brandon Ratcliffe,
Supervisor
When Brandon Ratcliffe joined Discovery Ranch he was just looking for a summer job. That was more than a year ago. “I love this job!” he states emphatically. “I’ve had to put off my last semester of college for a year because I just can’t quit.”
What’s the best part of working at the ranch? “To see how the girls change from where they start to where they end. You can actually see the change in them – how they talk, how they present themselves. It’s a complete changeover for them,” he says.
“They learn accountability, integrity, leadership. Everything about the ranch is ideal for a young person growing up.”
Brandon started at Discovery working in the Boy’s House. He’s now a supervisor in the Girl’s House. While he enjoyed playing football and lifting weights with the guys, he says Discovery girls have helped him see another side of life. “The girls open up to you more. You see a sensitive side of people and that brings out a sensitive side of you.”
“I never thought I had patience until I started working here,” he says with a laugh. “You learn how to adapt to different kinds of personalities. Once you get to know people you learn how to find the good in every single person you work with.”
When he’s not working at the ranch, Brandon enjoys fishing, four-wheeling and watching the Utah Jazz.
Wendy Smith,
Office Manager
“Coming to the ranch is the best thing I’ve ever done.” That’s how Wendy Smith describes her career change. Trained as a dental assistant, she’d worked in healthcare for a dozen years before she decided to look for something different.
Wendy’s childhood friend, Terri Miller, Discovery’s Boy’s Program supervisor, had the perfect opportunity. Wendy joined the ranch in 2007 and has loved it ever since.
“I totally love my job,” she says. “I love coming to work every day. The people I work with make the biggest difference in the world. They’re like my family.”
As Discovery’s office manager, Wendy keeps track of all the paperwork – including certifications, human resource documentation, and incidental accounts for every student.
She also shops for the fabric students pick from when they create their quilts. Once the quilts are tied, Wendy turns her attention from forms and telephones to the sewing table in the rear of her office. She binds the quilts and finishes the edges.
If there’s a down side to her job, Wendy says it’s the fact that she often worries about the students and finds herself thinking about them even at home with her own family.
Her cure? “Shopping!” Wendy says with a laugh. “The better the bargain, the better I feel. I love all the girly stuff.” When she and her 14-year-old daughter aren’t shopping, they’re probably at one of her 17-year-old son’s baseball games.
While she’s busy with a family of her own, Wendy says she’s never too busy for some extra mothering at the ranch. “I’m the hugger mom,” she admits proudly. “If your student needs a hug, call me.”
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Jason Paleczny
Where to start? Karen Paleczny sighs as she thinks about her son, Jason’s life.
“Jason had a lot of problems,” she recalls. He was diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder. He was a narcissist, strong willed and driven, but not necessarily in the right ways. We started counseling and had been in counseling for many years.
Karen says drugs, sex and reckless living formed the pattern of her son’s life. She and Jason’s father, Jeff, knew they had to find a better solution fast. “Things were just spinning out of control.”
They opted for a wilderness program and arranged for private security to escort him there.
Jason made great progress but everyone agreed that he still needed more. “He needed more insight in order to integrate what he was beginning to learn about himself,” Karen explains.
The educational consultant that they had been working with suggested the experiential focus at Discovery Ranch might be a good fit.
Karen and Jeff visited the ranch while Jason was at the wilderness program. They spent 6 hours with Marlene Kendall, the Admissions Director, asking page after page of questions Karen had compiled.
“When I saw the boys’ house it made me feel like I was sending him to a home that I had hoped to create for him in the last few years,” Karen recalls. “We met many of the staff and were greatly impressed. The students we met were able to talk openly about where they had been and what they were now focusing on.” She says many students had goals of attending college after they graduated.
“At first, the calf program seemed kind of hokey,” she says. That feeling quickly disappeared when she saw how tender the students were with the little calves and how committed they were to the animals’ wellbeing.
“I knew that might help Jason get back in touch with the person who he really was inside. Jason had a very competitive streak and I felt that the horse program would help him. The horse would only do what the student wanted when the student was able to do it without aggression, an issue Jason had.”
Karen also liked the ropes courses and the wide open spaces. “I instantly knew this was a place he would not only learn from, but enjoy.”
Jason enrolled in the ranch in April, 2008. “By the time he left, he had graduated from high school many months earlier than his peers back home with straight A’s,” Karen says. “He was in advanced equine and had found a new passion that he will enjoy the rest of his life. He had worked with many calves, nursing them back to health and sometimes burying them, which can be part of ranch life.”
She adds, “The caring staff and the ranch’s excellent therapists helped Jason shed his tough, uncaring exterior and find a way to relate to others without anger, but with respect. He found out the parts of him that worked and did not. Perhaps the best part of all was that he realized we loved him. He was part of our family and that we weren’t one without him.”
Karen admits that life isn’t perfect now that her son is back home. There are still challenges. “When he talks about the wise mind and the emotional mind-sometimes conversations last 2-3 hours and we like it!” Karen says. “He is a good teacher. The most impressive thing is that he uses it every day for big things and little things. He has incorporated it.” She adds, “We all know how to compromise now. We have fun together now.”
“We could have saved a lot of money if we’d sent him to Discovery Ranch instead of counseling for so long,” she says with a laugh. ”This is the best money we have ever spent, we have our son back.”
As Abbey Lane rode home in the taxi, she was unsure how her parents would greet her. In fact, she wasn’t even sure if her parents would greet her. Just weeks into her freshman year at Humboldt State University, Abbey was headed back home.
“It was a big party school,” she says, something she didn’t realize when she enrolled. While she loved her roommates, she says every day of the week was a different excuse for drinking or sex. “That just wasn’t what I was looking for.”
Concerned their daughter may be looking for an easy out and returning to avoidance strategies from earlier in her life, her parents encouraged her to stay and stick it out.
But Abbey had a plan. “I talked with advisors. I talked with professors. I put myself in academic leave. That left my options open,” she says. “That never would have happened before the ranch.”
“I ended up buying my own ticket home and taking a taxi home to parents who really didn’t accept my decision,” Abbey recalls. “I had two weeks to get a job. It was very stressful.”
Abbey says her relationship with her father has been strained since she was 13. They fought constantly. During therapy at the ranch, there were times when she refused to speak to him.
She says the eight months she spent at Discovery Ranch were tough. She missed her family and friends constantly. Having been home for a year now, Abbey says she’s a whole different person.
“The ranch offered me an escape from the drama of nuisance things and I could just focus on my family and myself. They provided a place where I excelled in school. I did well with the routine of things,” she continues, “and I think any kid will do really well because what they do is they provide a way where you get noticed. There are job phases where you can show your leadership. There are a lot of ways you can see the good in life.”
She thinks her father was hurt and disappointed when she rejected her parents’ advice and left Humboldt. But that experience proved to be a turning point in all their lives.
“After he saw that I was happy coming home and working hard 30-40 hours a week, I think he saw that I had grown up a little more,” she says.
“He wrote me a letter for my birthday and said, ‘The biggest gift I could give you is acknowledging how great this last year has been.’”
She continues, “I cherish it so much to think that I’m 19 now and I just started becoming friends with my father.”
Proud of her two year sobriety, Abbey plans on returning to college this fall, but not at Humboldt. She’ll attend a community college closer to home and begin work on a degree in zoology. “I’m in such a good place now that I never thought I’d be in.”
“This is the hardest lesson for me,” Jill Ruesch-Lane confesses, “I have to let her go at her own pace and make her choices. She’s not going to do it exactly like I would do it, or the order I would do it. I’ve learned to step back and let her make her decisions and pick herself up.”
Jill says the family sought help from Discovery Ranch after 16-year-old Abbey’s third emergency trip to the hospital. “We had tried lots of different kinds of therapy and support and we just said, ‘This is not working.’”
Jill says Abbey had disordered eating, depression, and rage issues. After an educational consultant recommended Discovery Ranch, she and her husband came for a visit. “Abbey loves animals. There were a lot of positive things going on there,” she explains.
Although she felt good about the program, she describes Abbey’s departure as traumatic. “It’s a pretty traumatic decision to send your kid away,” Jill says. “You feel like you’ve failed.”
Jill says Abbey was furious when she learned she wouldn’t be coming home after her last hospitalization. Her parents arranged for a private security escort to take her directly to Discovery Ranch.
“Once she was there, it was a relief,” Jill recalls. “We had been through years of roller coaster emotions and traumas – good weeks and bad weeks and never quite certain things were going to be OK. There was some space now where we could breathe and know that she was safe, addressing her issues, and being taken care of. It was an enormous relief that we were doing something much more comprehensive than we had ever been able to do.”
Still, the first two months were difficult. Abbey constantly begged to come home and never really made any attempt to engage in the program. She says Discovery Ranch provided a much needed “mirror” to see themselves, and their child’s problems, through new eyes.
“We all fell into lots of bad habits around trying to have a normal life,” she says. “We just kept making exceptions for behavior and things that were going wrong in the family. Abbey had a lot of issues but it was a family dynamic as well.”
Discovery Ranch provided the foundation for change. During eight months of therapy, Jill says “All of us learned to communicate better and to cope better.” That has carried over to home life, as well.
“The really huge difference is we will have conflicts over issues but Abbey will come to the table to talk. In the past, she would storm out, get angry, shut down.” Jill explains, “Sometimes she is too emotional to talk but she will say, ‘I’m going to go calm down. Can we talk later?’”
“Through DBT she developed a set of tools that she could use in her life. What she learned at Discovery Ranch, this set of DBT skills, has helped her to function better in life. She has a much better set of resources.”
Jill concludes, “I’m very proud of how far she’s come. She’s working hard at managing better in life. It is a struggle for her sometimes. But she continues to push herself.”
“I’ve learned to step back and let her make her decisions, letting her do it in her own way.”
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