The Bridge Between the School Year & Summer
May is a powerful month at CORRAL. Our teens and programming staff are preparing for the end of the school year, summer, and End of Year celebrations, where they celebrate their many accomplishments from the year.
It’s also Mental Health Awareness Month and the timing couldn’t be more meaningful than now. Right as we’re celebrating how far our teens have come, we’re also thinking carefully about what comes next, and making sure the progress they’ve made doesn’t get lost over the summer.
That gap is real. When school ends, so does access to school counselors, daily routines, peer support, and the kind of predictable structure that helps teens feel safe and empowered. For young people already navigating mental health challenges and unpredictable situations, summer can quietly undo months of hard work.
At CORRAL, our job is to make sure the skills and resources we provide carry our teens throughout summer and every season that follows.
How Our Mental Health Professionals Support Teens
Our mental health professional is part of the multidisciplinary team that supports the mental health needs of each child in the program. This includes supporting the horse time curriculum, where participants receive equine-assisted mental health support; implementing and supporting individual goals for each participant; and coordinating with families to ensure that children are receiving the support that they need.
Each week, our teens have the opportunity to spend 4.5 hours with their horse partner, working on skills that support both the horse time curriculum and their mental health. Our mental health professional is always present on the farm when the girls are to ensure they have the holistic support that they need, whether during a therapy session or a tutoring session.
Mental Health is essential to overall health and quality of life. It plays a critical role in breaking down societal stigma, encouraging early intervention, and creating a supportive community where people feel empowered.
Mental Health Awareness Month is about more than awareness. It’s about showing up for one another.
The Work That Happens Before Summer Starts
One of the things we’re most proud of is that summer doesn’t sneak up on us. By the time school lets out and Riding Academy programming comes to a close, we’ve already been planning for months.
During our third quarter staff planning meetings, our Neuse River team sat down to look at each student individually – their academic needs, their mental health needs, and where their skills are with their equine partner. They mapped out their own summer availability alongside the teens, then surveyed families directly to understand what their summers actually look like. Because real support has to fit into real life.
For our rising seniors, our Education Manager, Mrs. Shelby, took an extra step: identifying what that specific transition needs, from high school to whatever comes next, and scheduling sessions proactively. Senior year ending is one of the biggest life transitions a young person faces.
Additionally, at our End of Year Celebration, every family leaves with something tangible: a list of summer camps, community resources, and supportive services so that the safety net extends well beyond our gates.
Giving Families the Tools to Hold the Work at Home
There are a lot of things that we’ve learned over time: teens grow and when they do, their community has to grow with them. That’s why we invest in parents, not just kids.
At our recent Bring Your Parent to CORRAL Day, our Manager of Social Emotional Learning, Ms. Lana, facilitated a group equine-assisted psychotherapy session with parents and teens together. It was a live, hands-on experience designed to model how families can have healthy conversations when conflict arises. Parents got to practice, with staff support, the same tools their kids are learning so they can do it on their own during summer.
It’s not enough to help a young person develop new tools for managing conflict, stress, or hard emotions if the adults and peers around them are still operating from old patterns.
The goal: by the time summer starts, families are informed and equipped to navigate complex situations without us in the room. That is the change that we are striving to bring.
Closing the Gap
This summer, our programming teams will continue operating Join the Herd rounds, ensuring that we serve over 20 girls across both farms and continue building connections to our community.
We also have some exciting news from our Neuse River farm: we have a new horse joining the herd! Our horses and teens walk alongside each other as partners in the healing process. Their horse partners meet them exactly where they are and respond honestly and without judgment. Adding to our herd means more capacity to offer that kind of connection this summer and beyond.
Both of our farms currently have waitlists for our programs. We take that as a sign of the trust this community has placed in us, and we’re working hard to serve every family who needs us. Generosity from our community helps sustain our services and allow us to serve more teens.
If you believe in this work, here’s how you can help:
REFER A GIRL at corralriding.org/refer-a-girl.
GIVE by visiting corralriding.org/give.
VOLUNTEER at corralriding.org/volunteer.
Join us in this powerful mission of providing a holistic program of equine therapy and education for our teens.
