Relationship-Focused Communication as a Greenbrier Academy Value

A longtime educational leader, L. Jay Mitchell oversees Greenbrier Academy for Girls (GBA), a therapeutic boarding school in Southeastern West Virginia, as its founder and owner. L. Jay Mitchell designed the school to provide young women who have experienced trauma with an opportunity to develop self-esteem and a positive sense of connection with others.

To this end, GBA instills healing and empowering intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships between adolescent girls and their families. This entails a combination of mentorship and advanced therapeutics, as well as the application of critical thinking in academic and group settings. Moreover, the approach not only engages the intellect, but it also involves an experiential component and focuses on developing a social conscience through “relationship-focused words and actions,” whether in counseling sessions or through classroom conversations.

The aim of this emphasis on relationality, or relational communication, is to “[live] more virtuously.” Reflecting this communication-focused mandate, GBA administrators and educators, who offer a combination of innate understanding and advanced professional training, are generally altruistic and have high moral standards.