Channel Six News was granted a rare look inside the most intensive level of care offered for residents of Boys Town. It's this area that the attorney of a 12-year old boy who accidentally shot his 15 year old friend recently brought into the news. He tells Channel 6 News he succeeded in getting Kameron Jones accepted into this part of Boys Town.

Thursday, Channel 6 News talked with one young man who just completed his first week in the Boys Town Intensive Residential Treatment Center. The center is not on the Boys Town campus at 144th and West Dodge Road, but it’s a locked facility near the Boys Town Hospital at 30th and California. It’s been a week of change from an old life to the start of a new one for this young man.

"At first I was like cool, I have a bad rep and now it's like it's pathetic,” the young man said. “That’s not what I really want."

The days in the IRTC are highly structured. The kids staying here are not yet ready for the Boys Town campus.

"More severe behavioral and emotional problems that are often expressed in physical aggression, assaulted behavior, property destruction," Boys Town Medical Director, Dr. Doug Spellman said.

Prior to 1995, Boys Town could not even take kids with these problems. Now the 47 beds here stay full for four to six months of treatment.

"It’s our job to stabilize them, teach them better self control, teach them to deal with some of the things that have happened in their lives and move them along to our less restrictive levels of care," Dr. Spellman said.

"We are being very successful at stepping kids down from very intense levels of care to more family-like or even back to their home families and that's one of the things that we're really good at at Boys Town," Boys Town Executive Director Father Steven Boes said.

The Boys Town we're more familiar with consists of family style group homes. That's the level 17-year old Christina started at, and she now shares a home with five other girls and a married family teaching couple.

"I was just making some really poor choices and taking a road that I didn't want to but I was kind of, I guess you could say peer pressured into," Christina said.

After two and a half years at Boys Town, Christina graduates this May.

"Being able to make my parents proud and show them that being successful was a capability of mine was something that was really important to me," Christina said.

Helping more and more kids like Christina nationwide is a never ending goal for Boys Town.

One thing many might not realize about Boys Town is how many kids it helps nationwide. There are 13 facilities in 11 total states. Fifteen thousand kids were helped in all last year. Many of those kids were helped through in-home services, an area Boys Town is trying to expand. That’s where counselors go into homes to help kids and their parents.