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Boulder County · Ages 13 to 17

Teen PHP in Boulder

Our most structured teen program, without sending your teen out of Boulder County. A full clinical day on weekdays, and home every evening.

Get help for your teen Call (303) 219-0973
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Partial hospitalization

Intensive treatment that does not send your teen out of Boulder County.

The Redpoint Center's teen partial hospitalization program in Boulder is a full clinical day on weekdays, with your teen home in the evening. There is no overnight stay and no hospital admission. It runs the same clinical model and the same standards as teen PHP across Colorado, out of our Boulder office, for families in Boulder County.

Boulder County is what this page is actually about. Families told their teen needs more than a weekly appointment are often handed options an hour or two away, or out of state entirely. A local day program makes a different trade: your teen keeps the same house, the same school, and the same friends, and does the clinical work in the community they are going to keep living in.

It does take the school day, and there is no version of this level that does not. That is worth naming before anything else. The school conversation happens before your teen starts rather than after, and it is a shorter conversation when the school is in the same county as the program. If your family cannot make that trade right now, our teen IOP also runs in Boulder, three afternoons a week after the last bell.

Teens come to the Boulder program from Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Superior and Erie, and from across the rest of Boulder County and the US 36 corridor. Ages 13 to 17. Availability changes, so call and we will tell you what is actually running in Boulder now rather than what is theoretically offered.

  • Ages 13 to 17
  • A full clinical day, weekdays
  • Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Superior, and Erie
What being local actually changes

On the ground

What a local day program actually changes.

Every teen PHP at Redpoint runs one clinical model. What Boulder adds is proximity, and proximity changes specific things rather than being a general nicety.

The school conversation happens close to home

With your permission our team coordinates with your teen's school on coursework, attendance and the plan for going back. The office is within easy reach of Boulder High, Fairview and the other local schools, so that is a short conversation rather than a logistical one.

Care does not restart from zero

With your consent we coordinate with the pediatrician or outside therapist your teen already has. That is a phone call between people in the same county rather than a records request across a state line.

Teen services here have their own leadership

Boulder runs a dedicated teen clinical team rather than an adult team covering a day shift. The people who lead it are named further down this page.

Family sessions parents can actually attend

Family therapy is scheduled work at this level, not an optional evening bolted on at the end. A twenty-minute drive instead of a two-hour one is often the difference between parents attending and parents apologizing.

A peer group living the same week

Group runs every day, and in a local program the other teens in the room are from the same towns and often the same schools. Teens tend to drop the performance faster in front of people whose week looks like theirs.

Skills get tested the same evening

Your teen goes home each night into the exact situations the skills are for. Something named at eleven in the morning gets tried at dinner, which is the part a program in another town cannot give you.

How we work

School is what PHP costs, so school is what we plan around.

A full clinical day takes the school day with it. What decides how a family remembers this program is not whether your teen misses school, it is what was arranged about it.

The research on getting adolescents back into school after intensive treatment is thinner than it ought to be, and it is more useful to say so than to imply otherwise. The systematic review that comes closest, published in Continuity in Education in 2023, covers inpatient psychiatric stays rather than day treatment, and its authors state plainly that the literature in this area is scant and often rests on small samples or less rigorous methods. What it does identify is a short list of practices that hold up: a named transition point person in both the program and the school, a formal transition meeting rather than a forwarded email, and supports agreed in advance rather than improvised in week three. Those are inexpensive things to do well when the school is in the same county, and they are the things we do.

It matters because school is not only coursework. A 2022 systematic review in BMC Public Health found that higher school connectedness predicts lower depression and anxiety symptoms in secondary-school students, while being careful to add that the same evidence could not establish whether improving it helps a young person already in an episode recover. Read that as a reason to protect the connection your teen still has rather than as a promise about treatment. A teen who quietly loses their place at Boulder High or Fairview over two months has been handed a second problem on the way out of the first.

The clinical work itself is named rather than vague. Individual sessions draw on cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and trauma-focused approaches, chosen for the teen rather than handed out at intake, and the plan targets what actually brought them in, whether that is severe anxiety, something that happened to them, or staying sober. Group runs daily. Recreation and art are on the schedule rather than squeezed into it, because a full day is long and teenagers open up sideways, through doing something, far more reliably than across a desk from an adult. Some of that time uses the open space around Boulder when the weather allows.

Two more things worth being plain about. PHP is a phase rather than a destination: most teens step down into teen IOP, which also runs in Boulder, and then into lighter continuing work, so the return to a full school week is staged rather than sudden. And if the school day is a trade your family genuinely cannot make right now, say that at the assessment. It changes the recommendation, not whether we can help.

The clinicians who lead teen care in Boulder.

Teen services in Boulder are led by their own clinicians rather than by an adult team covering a day shift. These are the people your teen would actually be working with.

Meet the full clinical team
  • Erin Yaden

    Erin Yaden

    LPC

    Clinical Program Manager of Teen Services

  • Alec Manalac-Kwasna

    Alec Manalac-Kwasna

    MA · LPC

    Teen Primary Therapist

  • Anna McSherry

    Anna McSherry

    M.A.Ed · LPCC

    Boulder Primary Therapist (Teens)

Starting

How a Boulder family starts.

  1. 1

    You call, or send the form.

    Tell us what has been happening, in whatever words you have. No diagnosis and no referral letter required. If a school counselor, a pediatrician or an emergency department is the reason you are calling today, lead with that, because it changes how quickly we move.

  2. 2

    A clinical assessment.

    A clinician meets your teen, and meets you, and works out whether a full clinical day is genuinely the right level. Sometimes the honest answer is teen IOP or weekly therapy instead. That is a better result to have before you enroll than after.

  3. 3

    The school conversation, before the first day.

    We agree who the point of contact is at your teen's school, what happens to coursework and attendance while they are with us, and what going back is going to look like. Handled up front, this is administrative. Handled in week three, it is a crisis.

  4. 4

    Your teen starts, and the step down is already drawn.

    Family sessions go on the calendar in the first week, and so does the plan for what follows. For most teens that is teen IOP, which also runs in Boulder, with the same clinicians carrying through.

Parent questions

What Boulder parents ask.

Where is teen PHP in Boulder, and who can get to it?
Teen PHP runs out of The Redpoint Center's Boulder office, and families reach it from Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Superior and Erie, along with the rest of Boulder County and the US 36 corridor. It serves ages 13 to 17. Availability varies, so call and we will tell you what is running now. Redpoint's other teen PHP site is Thornton, which is usually the shorter drive if you are coming from the north Denver metro rather than Boulder County. For 18 and over, our adult PHP also runs in Boulder.

Will my teen miss school, and what happens to their classes?
Yes. A full clinical day runs on weekdays and takes the school day with it, and that is the honest trade this level asks for. What we can do is handle it deliberately: a named contact at the school, an agreement about coursework and attendance before the first day, an hour of each day set aside for schoolwork, and a staged plan for going back rather than a sudden return. If that trade is not one your family can make right now, teen IOP runs three afternoons a week, 4 to 7pm, and leaves the school day alone. Which one fits is a clinical question as much as a scheduling one.

Is this a different program from your Colorado teen PHP?
No, it is the same program. Redpoint runs teen PHP at two offices, Boulder and Thornton, on one clinical model with the same structure and the same standards. This page exists because the Boulder program is embedded in Boulder County: local schools, local pediatricians, and a peer group drawn from the same towns. If what you want is the level-of-care explanation on its own, without the local detail, read teen PHP in Colorado, or start at our teen programs overview.

Is PHP the same as my teen being hospitalized?
No. There is no admission, no overnight stay and no locked unit. Your teen attends during the day and sleeps at home every night, which is the line that keeps this an outpatient level of care. The word hospitalization in the name describes the intensity of the treatment day, not where your teen lives. Whether your teen can be safe at home overnight is the clinical threshold between this and inpatient care, and establishing it is part of the assessment.

What does a day actually include?
Individual therapy, group therapy every day, scheduled family sessions and parent education, coordination with your teen's school, an hour each day set aside for schoolwork, medical oversight and medication management where they are needed under our Medical Director, and time that is deliberately not therapy: recreation, movement and art. Some of the activity time uses the open space around Boulder when the weather allows. The specific schedule is confirmed with you before your teen starts.

Do you work with our school and our pediatrician?
With your consent, yes, and routinely rather than exceptionally. We coordinate with the school on coursework, attendance and re-entry, and with the pediatrician or outside therapist your teen already has, so that care carries on rather than restarting from zero. Being in the same county is most of what makes that practical.

What happens after PHP?
Almost nobody finishes PHP and simply stops. The usual path is down a level, into teen IOP in Boulder and then into lighter continuing work with the same clinicians, and that path is drawn in the first weeks rather than the last. It is the main practical reason to choose a provider that runs more than one level of care: your teen does not start over with a new set of adults every time the intensity changes.

Does insurance cover teen PHP?
In most cases, yes. We accept Aetna, Anthem, Carelon Behavioral Health, Cigna, First Health Network, Kaiser Permanente, Rocky Mountain Health Plans, Select Health, TRICARE and United Healthcare, and we will still check a plan that is not on that list. We can also accept some Colorado Medicaid policies. Call us or submit an insurance verification form to find out about your specific coverage.

What if this is an emergency right now?
Call or text 988 before anything else on this page. It reaches 988 Colorado, the state mental health line, free and confidential, 24 hours a day. If your teen is in immediate physical danger, call 911. The Redpoint Center is an outpatient center rather than a crisis line, and once the immediate danger has passed we can take care from there.
Not sure whether a full clinical day is the right level? Call (303) 219-0973

Start where your teen already lives.

Describe what has been going on at home and at school. We will tell you whether a full clinical day in Boulder is the right level for your teen, including when it is not, and what the week would actually look like.

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