BOULDER -- Today is a tough day for 17-year-old Justine.

Her young face is impassive, her voice flat. Glossy, shoulder-length brown hair sometimes veils her round face. Occasionally tears well in her eyes, but don't spill over.

Justine was working at a part-time job in Boulder. She had a foster family lined up. She was on her way out of Alternative Youth Adventures, soon.

Or so she thought.

She went on a home visit the weekend prior with her potential foster family. Then she called some old friends --

people who weren't on a list of approved contacts.

From there, her weekend spiraled out of control. She doesn't give details. Her therapist is still sorting out what happened.

When she returned, she cut herself, a destructive behavior that she and her therapist hoped she'd moved beyond.

Now she's back at the beginning, with no privileges, and under constant staff observation.

At bedtime she must drag her mattress out of her group home bedroom and sleep in the day room, so staff members can keep an eye on her 24/7.

Despite the recent stumble, she's come a long way from that day in May when she first arrived, another scared girl at AYA.

"This can't be the place," she remembers thinking.

Her first glimpse of the old hospital-like buildings from Highway 69 filled her with trepidation. Coming down the drive, she saw an array of structures, some with boarded windows. In the distance looms a wooden climbing tower. In the foreground lie metal remains of broken playground equipment.

Her guardian mentioned she'd be living in a "unit." Entering the main building, they wound through a maze of white-walled corridors. A door opened and they entered the girls' New Journey group home.

It was surprisingly warm and cheery, a home-like space decorated in pink and rose. One of the girls was celebrating her birthday with a pizza and ice cream party. Justine began to relax.

Most of the students were placed here by their guardians -- rarely by their parents and hardly ever by a criminal commitment.

All of them are in a three-phase therapy program.

The first phase deals with accountability, the second deals with truly making and feeling changes. Phase three brings it all together, where they demonstrate the changes and mentor others.

Residents also have three behavioral levels, determined by the daily and weekly points earned for good school behavior, doing chores in the group home and such activities as practicing good hygiene.

Their weekly points determine what level of freedom they will have. As they move up the levels, there are higher expectations and responsibilities.

More than half of the 24 youths living here will turn their lives around within a few months at AYA and move to foster care or a group home back in their community.

Few return home. Most were taken from their parents' custody by a court order.

And about 40 percent won't thrive here. Some end up in detention centers.

All of the AYA residents struggle with mental health issues. All take medications for mental health symptoms. Some may suffer a mental health crisis that sends them to Shodair Children's Hospital in Helena.

Justine is here because she ran away, drank alcohol, used drugs and had unprotected sex.

"I had a lot of abuse in my life. I was making a lot of bad decisions. ... I wasn't being safe, so I am here."

Like the other AYA residents, Justine learned her clinical diagnosis -- depression and post traumatic stress disorder. She's finding that the medications are helping. But feelings of hopelessness occasionally return.

"Sometimes it feels like I'm not ever going to come out again. Sometimes it's like hearing a really sad song, over and over and over again."

Yet she also receives help. Her social worker earned her trust. And playing the beat-up Baldwin piano in the rec room soothes her.

"Before I arrived here, I didn't care what my actions would cause. Now I care more," she said. "I like that (AYA) is safe. I know that people in my past can't come here and hunt me down."

She's able to call her autistic brother in his group home, who at 20 just said his first word -- "hello." She is starting to think about him more, and miss him.

"I do well with structure. ... It's helpful," she said. "I struggle with impulse things. In a bad moment, I want to go out and drink. I want to run away."

But these actions bring consequences.

After her weekend adventure, the new foster parents backed out. Justine admits she feels like she doesn't deserve to live with them.

Perhaps a foster home isn't a good fit for her. None of her previous homes worked out.

Since arriving at AYA, school has become more important. At public school, no one cared if she missed class.

"I do a lot better here in school," Justine says. "I like science. We do a lot of hands on. We'll look up wild plants. We've made coffee out of a plant. We do a lot of cool things. (The instructor) turns the textbook into a conversation. We've talked about recycling. We've talked about global warming. He asks us what we can do to help the earth."

"I'm going to try to conserve water -- not run the water when I'm brushing my teeth or before a shower. I'm not a big environmentalist, but I like a lot of what he does."

She's also planning a future on the outside. She might join Job Corps. She'd like to operate heavy machinery, which she learned at one of her foster homes, and go to art school. She might start a business.

Maybe even start a family.

Down the hallway, other AYA residents are finishing their classes. One of the group homes is celebrating a resident's graduation.

For Bob, AYA is his latest stop in a series of placements during the past 18 months.

A slender 15-year-old with a cloud of curly brown hair, he looks both vulnerable and tough, like many of the clients.

He'd been on the move ever since leaving his parents' house -- where he won't be returning. His parents don't want him back. He lived with his grandmother, then in a group home. Both he and the group home were out of control, he said.

His next stop was a detention center near Deer Lodge. He was brought, in shackles, to AYA about a year ago, He remembers everything looked dead. All the trees had dropped their leaves.

Entering the driveway was like zooming in on a scene from his past. Bob recalled that when he was between the ages of five and 10, he and his parents would drive past the campus with its distinctive climbing tower on their trips to Helena and Great Falls.

His dad would say, "That's where all the bad kids go."

Bob thought the tower was cool and he wanted to climb it. But he never thought he'd wind up standing at its base, one of the "bad kids."

When he arrived, Bob was angry at everything. He didn't have friends. He argued. He put people down.

"I had this one-sided thought that I was always right," he said.

Bob avoids talking about what brought him to AYA, which includes a sexual offense. But like Justine, he openly discusses his diagnosis and medications.

He has ADHD and sleep apnea. During the night, he stops breathing in his sleep and wakes up, about 35 times per night.

Before he took medication, his thoughts were disorganized and flew threw his head. He made a lot of noise. He fidgeted. He couldn't focus.

"Bah!" he said and waves his hands in the air by his face, demonstrating the type of outburst he used to make, no matter the setting -- school or church.

Today, though, his hands rest calmly in his lap and he speaks about his behavior with a heightened awareness.

He's learning how to stop events from spiraling out of control. When something goes wrong, he's learning to talk to someone when the problem arises.

"I really, really like this place," he said. "There are rules here. Depending on your level, there's a certain intensity to them."

Someday, he hopes to have a foster family.

"We're working hard to find him one," said his counselor Jamie Grossberg. "But that might not happen."

Bob's taken up crocheting as a coping skill. It comforts him, he said, as he talks about his "sorrow blanket."

"Whenever I was sad I would crochet that," he said.

His new skills are helping him break his cycle, he said, and accept responsibility for his actions.

For example, he recently owned up to flushing a candy wrapper down the toilet about five months ago, which recently led to an unforeseen crisis for the building's aging plumbing.

"I have to clean the bathroom for a month," he said. "They (staff) don't do it out of unfairness. There's always a consequence."

It's this responsibility for his own actions that earns him the trust of the AYA counselors. And he's learning to trust others.

Trust is also the key to the climbing tower.

"That thing's focused on trust," he said. "You have to work as a team."

First they learn how to put on the climbing equipment and test it for safety. They have to trust their equipment.

Climbing requires communication between the climber and the belayer, he said. As a person climbs the tower, the belayer is holding the safety ropes, as does a back-up belayer. The climber has to trust others.

When he gets to the top of the tower, the climber asks permission to fall, and once it's granted, lets go. The climber must trust the equipment, the belayer and himself.

"It all ends up in trust," Bob said. "(Before) I didn't trust anyone."

Justine is still working on that. "I'm kind of afraid of that tower. I don't want to climb it."

She's learned she doesn't have to. Her struggle with trust comes in a different form.

"The hardest thing is just living day to day," she said.

If she makes bad decisions, like before, "I could lose the trust of people I care about. I could lose trust in myself. I could lose my freedoms."

"When I'm not depressed, it's easier to make the right decision," she said.

Reporter Marga Lincoln: 447-4074 or marga.lincoln@helenair.com