Valley View School

Valley View School is a therapeutic boarding school. We take the entirety of this term seriously. Overall, Valley View has the structure and sensibility of a classic New England boarding school, with 215 acres of wooded land, a pristine lake, beautiful dorms, and a sports complex. Look a bit closer and one sees a supportive academic program, sports teams, theater, arts, music, community service, and international travel. These experiences are designed to “reset” boys back into a healthy developmental rhythm.

Within this normalizing context, we provide extensive therapeutic engagement. Our therapeutic milieu has been honed over 50 years to contain acting out without drama, and support healthy emotional expression and behavior regulation. We provide intensive advising/mentoring, plus individual and family psychotherapy. All students participate in our ongoing group therapy program. In addition, we provide a wide variety of specialized therapy groups designed to address areas of life with which our boys often struggle. Through this process, we provide our boys with paths to becoming healthy, balanced and productive young men.

Dr. Philip Spiva founded Valley View School in 1970, based on his vision of a therapeutic boarding school–a term that did not even exist at the time. As an undergraduate studying Psychology at Boston University, Dr. Spiva worked at the prestigious Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston where he learned about direct child-care. He also spent several summers as a counselor at Camp Wediko in New Hampshire, coming to understand the problems faced by troubled youth. While pursuing his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Spiva envisioned a small boarding school for boys with a structured environment and a strong academic commitment, where boys could mature at their own pace, guided by an empathetic staff, away from the pressures of the outside world.

Admissions Contact Name: Thomas Nowak
Email: t.nowak@valleyviewschool.org