A teenage boy in a green jacket with a backpack walking toward the camera along a tree-lined residential sidewalk, parked cars and houses behind him.

Adams County ยท Ages 13 to 17

Teen PHP in Thornton

Our most structured teen program, run out of our Adams County office. A full clinical day on weekdays, your teen home every evening, and their school year handled from the first week.

Get help for your teen Call (303) 219-0973
A woman and her teenage daughter talking across a wooden kitchen table over cereal and orange juice, houseplants on the sill behind them.

What this is

A full clinical day, without the hour on the highway.

The Redpoint Center's teen partial hospitalization program in Thornton 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 Thornton office on Grant Street, built on evidence-based skills work in CBT and DBT.

Adams 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 is also, practically, a schedule a working parent can sustain for the full course of treatment rather than the first few weeks of it.

It does take the school day, and there is no version of this level that does not. That is worth naming before anything else. Research on returning to school after intensive treatment is blunt about where this goes wrong: coordination between programs and schools is informal and inconsistent, only about 16 percent of the schools surveyed had a formal reintegration plan, and the expert consensus is that planning should start at admission rather than at discharge. So we start it before your teen's first day. And if the school day is a trade your family cannot make right now, our teen IOP also runs in Thornton, three afternoons a week from 4 to 7pm, which leaves the school day alone.

Teens reach the Thornton program from Adams County and the suburbs around it, including Northglenn, Westminster, Federal Heights, Commerce City, Brighton, Henderson and Welby, along with Broomfield and Arvada to the west, and from across the Adams 12 Five Star, Mapleton, Westminster and 27J school districts. Ages 13 to 17. Availability changes, so call and we will tell you what is actually running in Thornton now rather than what is theoretically offered.

The clinical day

What your teen's week actually looks like.

A day program is not a longer therapy appointment. It is a structured clinical day, and these are the parts of it that matter most to parents.

Individual therapy, with one clinician who stays

Your teen works with the same therapist rather than restarting with a new adult every few weeks. The plan targets what is actually happening, whether that is anxiety, depression, trauma or substance use, rather than a generic adolescent curriculum.

Group therapy is most of the day

Skills work practiced with peers who are in the same week. For most teens the group is the part that does the work, because hearing it from another sixteen year old lands differently than hearing it from an adult.

Family therapy is scheduled work, not an optional extra

Family sessions go on the calendar in the first week. What changes at home tends to decide whether what changes in the program holds, so the work includes the people your teen goes back to each evening.

Co-occurring mental health and substance use, together

When both are present they are treated in the same plan by the same team, rather than being handed between two programs that do not talk to each other.

Recreation and art are on the schedule, not squeezed into it

A clinical day that is six hours of talking does not hold a teenager. Movement and creative work are how the day stays survivable, and how skills get practiced somewhere other than a chair.

Evenings and weekends at home

Your teen sleeps in their own bed and stays in their own life. That is the structural argument for this level over residential care.

Why local

What a program in your own community changes.

School

The school conversation is a short one

Your teen stays enrolled where they are, whether that is Adams 12 Five Star, Mapleton, Westminster or 27J. We agree the point of contact and the plan for coursework before the first day rather than after it.

Peers

The room is full of kids from the same towns

Group runs every day, and in a local program the other teens in it come from the same suburbs and often the same schools. For most teens that is the part that does the work.

Evenings

Skills get tried the same night

Whatever gets named at eleven in the morning gets tried at dinner, in the actual house, with the actual people. That nightly loop is most of why this level works.

The clinicians who lead teen care in Thornton.

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

Meet the full clinical team

  • Audra Webb

    LPC

    Thornton Clinical Program Manager of Teens

  • Michaela Kornberg

    Michaela Kornberg

    LCSW

    Clinical Lead (Teens)

  • Cheyenne Morris

    Cheyenne Morris

    LCSW

    Thornton Teen Primary Therapist

Starting

How a Thornton 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 fast we move.

  2. 2

    A clinical assessment, free either way.

    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 a lighter level or weekly therapy, and we will say so. That is a better thing to learn 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 looks like. Handled up front this is paperwork. Left until week three it is a much harder conversation.

  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: a lighter level, school re-entry, and who is carrying it.

Parent questions

What parents ask before they call.

Where is teen PHP in Thornton, and who is it for?
Teen PHP runs out of The Redpoint Center's Thornton office on Grant Street, and it serves ages 13 to 17. Families reach it from across Adams County and the northern Denver metro, including Northglenn, Westminster, Federal Heights, Commerce City, Brighton, Henderson and Welby, along with Broomfield and Arvada. Redpoint runs teen PHP at two sites, Thornton and Boulder. Thornton is usually the shorter drive from the north metro and from Denver proper, and it also runs teen IOP for teens who do not need a full clinical day. For 18 and over, our adult PHP runs at Fort Collins, Boulder and Longmont; the adult track in Thornton is an evening IOP rather than a day program.

How far is it from Denver?
Thornton is the closest Redpoint office to Denver, roughly fifteen minutes up I-25 from downtown outside of rush hour. Redpoint does not have a Denver office, so for a family in the city this is the nearest teen day program we run. Our Boulder teen site serves the northwest suburbs.

Is PHP or IOP better for my teen?
Neither is better. They are different intensities, and the assessment is what decides. PHP is a full clinical day on weekdays, and it is the right call when a teen needs more structure than an after-school program can hold. Teen IOP is lighter, a few afternoons a week, and fits a teen who is stable enough to stay in the school day. Teen PHP across Colorado explains the difference in full. Thornton runs both, so if the assessment points to teen IOP rather than a full clinical day, that is available at this office too.

What happens to my teen's school year?
A full clinical day takes the school day with it, and what decides how a family remembers this program is not whether their teen missed school but what was arranged about it. We agree the point of contact, the plan for coursework and attendance, and what going back looks like before the first day rather than after. Research is clear that this is where re-entry fails: coordination between programs and schools is patchwork at best and non-existent at worst, and most schools have no formal reintegration plan of their own.

Does this actually work?
In a study of 1,237 adolescents aged 12 to 18, anxiety and depression scores fell significantly from admission to discharge in adolescent partial hospitalization, and teens who had recently had suicidal thoughts improved at a similar rate to those who had not. The authors are careful about what that means: there was no comparison group, so the change is associated with treatment rather than proven to be caused by it. Be cautious with anyone who offers you a guaranteed success rate for a teenager.

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 my teen is in crisis 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 which level your teen needs? Talk to our team

Tell us what is going on.

Tell us what has been happening with your teen and we will help you work out whether a full clinical day in Thornton is the right next step, or whether something lighter fits better. Assessments are free and confidential.

(303) 219-0973 Text Us