Troubled teens caught in middle of Michigan treatment facility shuffle

• Michigan is moving a male-only juvenile justice facility to Macomb County, displacing a similar treatment facility in the same building
• That group, Rite of Passage, now says their St. Clair Youth Treatment Center is in danger of closing if it can’t get a new building by May 5
• Caught in the middle are boys and young men undergoing court-ordered behavioral health treatment 

LANSING — The care of more than a dozen troubled boys and young men ordered for treatment at a behavioral health facility in Macomb County is in limbo amid an ongoing building dispute between private operators and the state. 

Officials with Rite of Passage in Mount Clemens say they’re being pushed out of the building by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services — which first leased it to them in 2023 — to the detriment of the boys and young men they serve.

State officials, however, say they need the space to relocate other boys and young men from the aging Shawono Center in Grayling, a separate juvenile facility for males aged 12 to 21 that offers specialized, court-ordered treatment in addition to or instead of detention, as determined by a judge.

Caught in the middle are young people like Kyari Brown, one of the handful of boys aged 14 to 19 who attend Rite of Passage.

Juvenile detention was “a jungle” where he had to “fight for his food,”  but “everything changed” when he entered Rite of Passage’s St. Clair Youth Treatment Center program, he told legislators last month in a public hearing.

“This program helped me with school, it helped me be able to open up more, use communication, actually have more self-respect and self-awareness on myself and treat people with kindness,” Brown said, making clear he opposes any move forced by the state.

Hanging over the dispute are pleas from some state lawmakers to stop the Shawono Center's closure, which they say would exacerbate a shortage of such treatment centers in northern Michigan. 

There are currently 99 “child caring institutions” in Michigan, a mixture of public and private facilities that provide court-ordered treatment to more than 460 people as of 2023. 

Not all provide the same level of services, and most are centered in metropolitan areas. Just 16 are located north of Mount Pleasant. 

Shawono, a 40-bed facility in Grayling run by the state, specializes in treating young male sex offenders, those with addiction issues and “general delinquents.” It offers counseling, education and additional services. 

“To take away a placement center in northern Michigan — to move it to (metro) Detroit where you have all these municipalities that have more money than they have up north? I think it’s irresponsible," Rep. Mike Mueller, R-Linden, said last month.

Both the Shawono and Rite of Passage programs are designed to help severely troubled youth and young adults who are in the state’s criminal justice system, sometimes for felony crimes, by providing specialized and court-ordered behavioral health treatment. 

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They typically offer individualized therapy and wrap-around services designed to reintegrate juveniles back into society once their mandatory treatment concludes.

As the state prepares to move Shawono’s boys and young men to Macomb County, Rite of Passage is scrambling to find a new home by May 5 — when the state says they must leave. 

Lawmakers are pushing DHHS to hold off on the move until Rite of Passage can relocate their wards, calling a move by next month an “unrealistic directive” from the state.

Absent intervention, boys currently housed at the Macomb County facility could be transferred elsewhere throughout the state — or even sent back into juvenile detention to await a new placement. 

Plans to move?

The state announced in January plans to close its Grayling-based Shawono Center, citing the need to move “to a newer, more modern facility … that can better serve the youths and meet their treatment needs.” 

“We were able to take advantage of an existing lease that we already have in Macomb County, which we know will offer more options for staffing and is closer to where many of the youth who are going to Shawono actually live,” DHHS Director Elizabeth Hertel told Bridge Michigan on Wednesday. 

That facility, the Macomb Juvenile Justice Center, has approximately 140 beds and is securely designed — similar to a psychiatric hospital, with safety features uncommon at other child caring institutions — for mental and behavioral health treatment. 

Macomb County owns 80 of the beds, while Rite of Passage maintains the other 60 — 20 of which they use for their treatment program, which assists at-risk boys aged 12 to 19. 

The other 40 beds were recently added at the request of the state, Rite of Passage Regional Director Ike Shipman told Bridge, noting his company had for months been under the impression it would share the space with the state and potentially assist in the treatment of youth from Shawono. 

That changed in March, he said. Eventually, the state offered to “help us relocate, but each of the facilities they toured needed work, and preparing them “was going to take a lot of money and resources we didn’t have,” Shipman said. 

Hertel disputes any mixed messages from the state. 

The health department was “very clear that they would have to find a new location” and “that we would be taking the building” she said, noting the state at one point believed Rite of Passage was “in the middle of finalizing a purchase agreement” for another building. 

“Unfortunately, we don’t have any extra funding” to help Rite of Passage move, Hertel said. “If we did, I would be more than happy to help with their renovations.”

Despite conflicting accounts, the reality is clear: The state will move Shawono Center into the facility which Rite of Passage currently occupies, and their program will need to find new lodgings.

Should Rite of Passage not find a usable space in the next month, it's possible the program would cease to operate in Michigan altogether. 

Concern for treatment

Laura Marshall, a Cedar Springs mother of three, is no stranger to Rite of Passage, a Nevada-based company that provides youth services in several parts of the country. Her adopted son attended one of the company’s programs in Cheyenne, Wyoming, within the last five years.

She said her son’s time at the Rite of Passage facility was “so effective for him,” not just helping to manage violent emotional and physical outbursts, but also encouraging more social behaviors like smiling “genuine smiles” and making eye contact.

Though the changes were short lived — her son struggles with Reactive Attachment Disorder, among other things — for “about four to six weeks” he became “a very different youth in our home than we’d ever had,” said Marshall, whose son entered Michigan’s juvenile justice system at 12-years-old.

It’s why Marshall, one of three co-founders for the support and advocacy group Advocates for Mental Health of MI Youth, said she’d be concerned both for her son and her family’s safety should the program have abruptly shut down like what may happen in Macomb County.

“It really does, so often, come down to that really basic question of safety — it’s a basic question, but it’s a huge question,” Marshall said. “My No. 1 focus would be: ‘What happens next, and how can we ensure everyone’s safety in this scenario’?”

Rite of Passage officials say DHHS has begun transferring boys out of their treatment program and within the last week, well ahead of the May 5 move out date. As of March 9, 14 boys and young men remained. Where they end up — back in their communities, transferred to another treatment facility or sent back to detention in the interim — remains to be seen. 

“I’m very seriously concerned with the possibility of one of the kids that was in our program could get hurt in the community, or be hurt in the community,” Shipman said. “They're not ready. And I hope that the system is really prepared to do the right thing for those kids.”

But Hertel, the state health director, said she’s confident her department will find adequate placements for everyone at the center, telling Bridge she doesn’t believe it would “be a problem to find a place for them to move.”

“I don’t think, at this point, any of them would have to go back to detention,” she said. “I think we’ll be able to find a program placement for all the youth that are there.”