News Photo by Julie Riddle Laura Stibitz, principal of Alternative Choices for Educational Success Academy in Alpena, shows a classroom where a new juvenile diversion program will help keep young people out of residential placement.

ALPENA — Sometimes, the way to fix things is to just start.

An Alpena family court program that recently sprang to life was, six months ago, only a wish. That wish now is a reality that could keep young people in their homes, out of court, and headed to better futures.

“We’re hopeful,” said Kim Schultz, referee for Alpena County’s family court. “And we haven’t been hopeful.”

The PIVOT program — which gets underway this week as the first of its kind in Michigan, as far as its creators know — brings together representatives of multiple community agencies, all with the goal of helping kids at risk of being sent away from their homes and community for criminal activity.

Participants will be held to a rigorous schedule of individual and group counseling, job training, virtual classrooms, assessments, and other mandated activity.

And, program planners said, the participants will get to sleep in their own beds at night.

For years, those involved with Alpena’s family court have talked about the challenge of keeping juvenile offenders from slipping back into bad habits after an encounter with the court system.

For young people who needed strong interventions to keep from becoming dangers to themselves or others, no local options were available. Local courts often had no choice but to send young people out of the community to secure detention facilities or residential treatment, said Schultz.

There, most of the young offenders make radical changes under the influence of imposed structure, often improving their grades drastically and gaining a new, positive view of themselves.

Then they come home.

Kristy Butch, a probation officer who works with youth returning from residential placement, time after time has watched all the gain of treatment fall apart as youths resettled in their old environment.

Parents still couldn’t schedule counseling appointments, still didn’t get their kids to school or feed them, still had problems of their own that stood in the way of their children’s need for structure and guidance.

A few months or years later, Butch said, she’d see those kids who had been doing well standing before a judge or behind bars.

“This is the juvenile justice system,” said Schultz. “We’re supposed to be here to help kids.”

Schultz and family court officer Janelle Mott knew the county didn’t have the resources to provide the services offered by bigger counties.

Alpena couldn’t build a residential treatment center, and it couldn’t hire more probation officers to give troubled youths and their families more one-on-one attention to keep them on the straight and narrow.

This spring, a new idea was sparked.

With the assistance of newly installed Judge Ed Black, Mott and Schultz turned thinking into action.

Drawing on the resources of many agencies within the community, they created a program unlike any they’d seen in other counties.

The effort — which officially launches Thursday — will provide up to eight youth with an intense, personalized, highly structured environment. Three young people are currently enrolled in the program, with two more possible enrollees coming soon.

Alpena Public Schools opened classroom space in its Alternative Choices for Educational Success Academy school building, which is currently used one day a week while students are taught through virtual learning.

PIVOT participants, all of high school age, will be enrolled as ACES students and attend online classes while at the building.

The educational component will be only a portion of the program, however. Participants will be required to show up at the school four days a week, no excuses. Help with transportation will be offered to make sure they get there.

Wednesdays will be reserved for court appearances, family meetings with court representatives, or other planned activities to build relational skills.

On campus, the participants — selected for the program with an eye to the unique factors of their home lives that keep them from getting what they need to succeed — will receive counseling they’ll have no reason to miss. They’ll be required to take part in group projects that teach them how to interact with people — something some parents just don’t have the ability to teach, Mott said.

A school success worker will be on hand to notice that one student is wearing the same shirt for a week or that another eats two lunches every day — signs, to a trained eye, of inadequate food or care at home.

Participants will be connected with the North Eastern Michigan Rehabilitation and Opportunity Center in Alpena and provided with job-hunting skills and know-how in areas that match their strength. Many may be employed through NEMROC even before they leave the PIVOT program.

When Mott and Schultz pitched the program to a group of people from whom they wanted help, “everyone, within ten minutes, was like, ‘Yes. Yes, yes, yes,'” Mott said.

In addition to APS and NEMROC, Catholic Human Services, Northeast Michigan Community Mental Health, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency, and others signed on.

Since people started catching wind of the idea, Mott said, her email and phone have been blowing up with others asking what they can do to help.

County officials, too, were receptive, especially when Mott and Schultz pointed out that money was going to be spent either way. Either it would cover expensive residential placement — and the cost of failure when youth returned to the court system — or it could cover full-time staff positions to keep kids out of placement and help them add value to the community.

The hardest thing about working with young offenders, Mott said, is seeing bright, articulate, full-of-potential young people who have stopped believing in themselves and lost hope for their futures.

The PIVOT program may not fix all that. Nobody knows for sure, because nobody has tried it before.

But Mott and Schultz said they’re hopeful.

“The idea that we all have this opportunity to play a small part in that?” Mott said. “It’s really exciting.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.