Project Re-ED

Project Re-ED, the Project on the Re-Education of Emotionally Disturbed Children, is a program to provide effective and affordable mental health services for children. The program focuses on teaching a child effective ways of acting in and responding to the child’s social groups (family, schools, peer groups) and also working with those social groups to help them provide a more supportive environment for the child. It began as a pilot project in the 1960s at two residential facilities in Tennessee and North Carolina. It later expanded to more facilities, and the principles of treatment developed in the project have been replicated and adapted in many other programs.

The program was initiated by an 8-year grant awarded in 1961 by the National Institute of Mental Health to the George Peabody College for Teachers (then a separate school, now part of Vanderbilt University) along with the states of Tennessee and North Carolina. Nicholas Hobbs, a psychology professor and chair the Division of Human Development at Peabody College, was the project’s primary developer. The two states each provided a small residential school – Cumberland House in Nashville, TN and Wright School in Durham, NC – and at the end of the grant period the states assumed responsibility for continuing and funding the program. Within a couple of decades, more than two dozen re-ed schools had been established, and many more facilities had applied principles developed in the re-ed program.

The program was a response to a 1954 study from the Southern Regional Education Board and the National Institute of Mental Health which noted the lack of adequate services and facilities for emotionally disturbed children available at the time in the southeast United States. The structure of the Re-ED program was inspired in large part by residential programs in post-World War II Scotland and France addressing mental health needs in children resulting from effects of the war. These programs were staffed largely by teachers who received primarily on-the-job practical training in psychological therapy. Following that model, Project Re-ED carefully selected effective, experienced teachers with demonstrated adaptability and creativity, and provided them with one year of graduate level practical and theoretical training in working with emotionally disturbed children.

Development of the program was guided by social learning theory and ecological theory, and the program takes an educational rather than a therapeutic approach.

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