A freezing mid-January day in Battle Creek. A line of hangdog, slouching teens wraps around the hallways of the Michigan Youth Challenge Academy building, their families steeling themselves for goodbyes, some teary, some stoic. It will be 154 days before they see their children again.
These families are handing over their high schoolers out of love and desperation. They are the kids who fell in with “the wrong crowd,” the ones who got in fights at school, who cursed their parents and teachers, who showed up high or not at all.
They were kicked out, expelled, suspended, warned over and over again — or maybe given up on too soon. Because here on the campus of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Michigan Youth Challenge Academy has offered them another chance.
Here, for the next five and a half months, they’ll get mentorship, distance from the kids who care even less and use even more, and the support of a cadre who will spend the first few weeks yelling at them to square their corners and look straight ahead — this is military school, after all.