Inside a Michigan military school where families leave teenagers out of love, desperation

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.

They’ll get anger management and life skills classes and teachers helping them recover the credits they lost when they skipped school all those days to get wasted with friends or just sit around watching YouTube videos because no one was there to tell them to stop. They’ll have a chance to catch up and return to high school or, if they’re old enough, earn their GED or high school diploma.

They’ll perform 5,894 hours of community service, say innumerable sirs and ma’ams, do countless burpees and pushups a few inches away from other sweaty, angry teens who doubt they can keep going, if they can actually change.

They’ll have a chance to prove everyone wrong. Even themselves. The Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, followed students through the academy's most recent semester, watching students grow — and struggle — as their families held onto hope.

Acclimation phase: never at ease

The cleaving is quick as kids are sent one direction and families another, the pain hidden well by the teens and less well by their mothers, who well up at the sight of their babies — tall and disobedient and foul-mouthed as they might be — loping around the corner to be photographed, shaved, reformed.

The 100 boys and 45 girls are handed a bottle of water, their name on a placard to hold just below their chins — uncomfortably similar to a criminal mug shot — and an enormous black bag full of gear and clothes that they’ll live out of for the two-week acclimation period before they can be called cadets.

For the next 14 days, they are “candidates.” They’ll learn that in this place, disobedience leads to extra sprints and bear crawls — not just for whoever mouthed off but the whole platoon.

They’ll learn the things none of them yet believe matter: how to fold the thin white blanket covering their metal bunk to a perfect 45-degree angle, how to line up their shower shoes flush with the edge of their rack. How to ask for permission before passing a cadre member in the hallway, and answer almost every command with a “Yes, sir” — except the ones that order them to relax or be at ease. To those they must respond, “Never.”

And it must seem indeed like they are never at ease here, at least at first, in this hard new place where no one calls them by their first names. The food is institutional, the showers are shared, the kids are wary — of each other and of the team of authoritative adults they are now expected to obey more than most of them ever obeyed their mom, grandma or principal.

Most of the cadets who quit will do so in the first two weeks. Some are too homesick. Some can’t handle the withdrawal from whatever substances have been getting them through the days at school or out of it: the vape pens, the alcohol, the weed.

Others will quit because they give up on themselves like they’ve given up before: on algebra, ACT prep, the baseball team or God. This place is called a challenge for a reason.

So, the candidates who stay to become cadets better be ready to work hard. On their studies, on their attitudes, on their self-control. And on the conviction, no matter how weak it currently flutters in their chests, that they deserve more than the future they’re careening toward.

They have to want it

Frank Vasquez knows how the candidates are feeling as they’re put in the position of attention, as they look up into the face of their platoon leader for any sign of comfort and see only their own reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

An academy like this one saved his life 22 years ago. Instead of following his stepdad in and out of prison, he learned to set goals for himself, manage his time and take accountability for his actions. That’s what the Michigan Youth Challenge Academy teaches these kids, Vasquez says.

Military school can sound like it’s a punishment, he knows. And sure, there’s marching and ruck marches and following orders. But to him, it’s an incredible second-chance program.

The Michigan Youth Challenge Academy is one of about 40 Youth Challenge programs in the country. It opened its doors in 1999 as a GED and credit recovery program and expanded to offer diplomas, now in partnership with Marshall Public Schools.

The academy is in its 25th year, meaning 49 cycles of cadets have come and graduated. This fresh batch of terrified, wayward kids will be the 50th.

Vasquez spent five years training them and the last three years recruiting them. He believes that any kid who starts this process can finish it, but they have to want it. He literally will not admit teens who say they don’t want to come. If they don’t understand their own “why” for being here, they won’t get through the days that suck.

Vasquez says he has yet to meet a single soul who regrets doing it.

Here, they can focus on themselves, free from the distractions of their usual environment: their cellphones, their video games, their friends, their parents.

They’ll learn how to talk, how to stand, how to respond, how to work out and, in so doing, they’ll build their discipline and resilience, their positive mentality. They’ll work on their anger, their stress management, their conflict resolution and relationship skills. They’ll set goals for themselves and make specific plans for achieving them.

Each cadet works with a case manager and a mentor that the family has selected as someone who will be a positive role model and help hold them accountable to their own goals and keep them on track.

Once cadets graduate from the residential program they go into a yearlong post-residential program where they continue to check in with their mentors and with the academy.

The Michigan Youth Challenge Academy must report back to the National Guard on how its graduates are doing, the expectation being that 72% of them will be attending high school or college or working or volunteering full-time. For the past four cycles, the academy has hit near or above that level.

Some of them will continue to Job Corps, a residential career training program for youths that can also help them complete their educations. Others may return to high school or enlist in the military — the academy is a program of the National Guard — though there’s no obligation to affiliate with the armed forces.

But those choices are more than five months away. First, the cadets must get through the days Vasquez warns their parents about: the early ones, when they start hatching escape plans. The ones where they write letters home begging to quit. Because quitting is easy. And staying is a challenge.

Shoulders back, head up

It’s hard to imagine 15-year-old Estrella raising her sweet, quiet voice to launch curse words at teachers or instigate schoolyard fights. Turns out Star is something of an expert at this particular brand of troublemaking. Her first suspension was in preschool.

Star is a true Aries, always ready to battle, her mom Adelisa Lebron said, just like her snarling chihuahua, Rocky.

Lebron knew something bad was going to happen to her daughter if she didn’t fix things soon: jail, possibly death. Her grades were tanking, the school sent an email saying they were at a crossroads and didn’t know whether they could keep her.

Military school seemed like the only way to protect her.  

The longest Star had ever been away from home before was a week to visit her father — she called her mom three times a day begging her to come until Lebron drove 12 hours straight to Nebraska and drove them both straight back home. Now, Lebron is getting the letters she was warned about, postmarked from Battle Creek, Star’s handwriting erratic and rushed.

“Moma idk if I can do this whole 6 months I just miss you … I don’t want to quit but I just wanna hug n see you. I can’t do this Momma … it’s only Day 3 and I already wanna run away but I just need you momma N this aint for you to feel bad Im just saying if I do end up running away which ima try not to I’ll call you but I just need to see you.”

Lebron was prepared for this, though it didn’t make the reading any easier. Nor was the phone call from the academy easy to take — the one where they told her Star is refusing to follow orders. She can just imagine her daughter the way they described: standing outside in the frigid air with no hat, no mittens, her inhaler thrown defiantly into a snowbank.

But Lebron isn’t going to succumb this time, to get in her car and drive west toward the academy. She’ll have to endure just like her daughter will.

She heard the academy’s director, Michael Gillum, say that if Star can fight it out for 22 weeks, she’ll return home a different kiddo: shoulders back, head up, success in her eyes. Lebron hopes he’s right.

Two weeks in: Kaleb

Kaleb Jones doesn’t think being here is his last opportunity to change course, but he knows he better take it now, while it’s right in front of him and free. Otherwise, he’ll keep sliding down that hill he can never seem to get purchase on, the one with a diploma at the top and a good-paying job like his brother Michael found after he graduated from this academy a few years ago.

It’s not just that he wants something better than wiping down boats and bar tables like his mom has to. Lately, Kaleb has been wanting to care about something.

For a while, he hasn’t cared about much, and he definitely hasn’t cared about himself. If he did, it might have been easier to get off the couch at his friend’s house where he’d been crashing for months, screw the caps back on those bottles of liquor he was drinking like they were Faygo and show up for senior year.

He’d always been big-hearted and smart — gifted, they told him. Used to read a book a day as a kid, started playing chess young. But bad habits start young, too. Kaleb tried marijuana for the first time when he was 12 years old and by the time he was 13, it was a daily habit along with his nicotine vapes — nonstop.  

The more he consumed the less fun it was, the shorter the high lasted. He lost the good feelings, but bad feelings were gone, too, and that was something.

When even that wore off, he added drinking, and that worked. He felt that shallow pleasant feeling again. By the time he was 16, he was drinking every day, convincing the clerk in that liquor store on Seven Mile to sell him more, more, half a gallon between him and his friends, a pint just for himself, until he felt like his liver hurt and he was puking up blood.

That scared him. Kaleb agreed to give the academy a try. Michael cut Kaleb’s hair for him before he left and gave him a pep talk. Nevertheless, a new fear supplanted the old one and Kaleb cried in the car as they got near the academy.

But now that he’s here, and the acclimation phase is over, Kaleb already feels his outlook changing, feels his strength of character building. Maybe it’s the clear-headedness of 14 days without drugs, but he’s already able to walk away from an argument instead of letting it blow up. His mom always taught him to never swing first and he never has, but now he can convince himself he doesn’t even want to.

He’s here for his own success, he reminds himself. He is his own responsibility. He reads and rereads a letter his sister sent him reminding him he’s worthy. He’s starting to think it’s possible she’s right.

A few days ago, Kaleb sat at the foot of his rack with warm fingers and toes despite the fact he’s almost always cold. His belly was full of chicken parmesan and spaghetti, and in the back of his mind he was thinking about his family and that awesome possibility that he was worthy while reading "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" — the one where the magical hero goes reluctantly into a series of life-altering challenges.

And suddenly it dawned on him as he sat on the floor that there was no nicotine in his body, no weed and no alcohol, no friends or girlfriend or family nearby and yet he felt it: happiness. Real happiness, like he hadn’t felt since he was a little kid. Kaleb started crying again. He hoped he could keep feeling this because he liked it. He liked it a lot.

The cadre believes in these kids

In anger management class, the cadets learn about “I” statements: a way of expressing how someone’s actions or words make them feel without placing blame or attacking. “What have you learned about anger and coping skills since you’ve been here?” the cadre member asks the cadets who stare up at him from their desks.

“Take a deep breath before you speak,” one says. “You regret it when you don’t.”

“Being the person who stops talking and walks away actually feels good,” another cadet adds.

How would they have handled a situation where someone was making them angry before this program?

“Popped off at them,” comes an answer.

“Kicked their teeth in.”  

Each day is critical; there isn’t much time to rebuild these kids before they have to go back into the same environment and hold on to a new self.

Most of them need to be convinced that they can succeed. They need to know someone believes in them. “Once they learn that, all that doubt that they’re having is just in their heads, then they just start soaring,” said academy Deputy Director Karen Gonser.

She checks in personally with kids who are having an especially hard time, and she has as few tricks up her sleeves after years of working with troubled youths. If a kid is all up in their head, Gonser will bring her into her office and teach her how to crochet.

For the ones who want to quit, she tells them about one cadet who was really struggling but who kept going, kept fighting to finish. She shows them the recording of that cadet becoming a graduate, striding up to his commanding officer, giving high fives and yelling “We made it!”

They usually go back to class after seeing that.

These cadre members truly are rooting for these kids. Some of them were these kids. 

Like Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Mercer, who blew high school scholarships and spots in the choir and marching band when he decided he was too smart for it all and quit trying in senior year. He refused to go to summer school and joined the military instead — got his GED. So he knows.

If a cadet quits, frankly he doesn’t give a you-know-what about them, but for the ones who stay? He’s got their backs for the rest of his life. Like the other cadre members, he can envision what the new cadets can’t: their crying faces on graduation day as they walk across that stage full of pride and optimism.

These people who work here, Mercer and all the rest, they love seeing the finished product.

Approaching the halfway point

Say he’s drinking the Kool-Aid, but Kaleb enlisted in the Army National Guard last week. His plan is taking form now; he’ll be a combat medic. The Army will pay into a college fund for him, so that he can continue with school — maybe even become a psychiatrist one day and help soldiers and veterans with their mental health.

The rank structure is working as intended: Kaleb is motivated to get promoted, to be an example and to receive the perks that come along with the “fruit salad” of badges and honors cadets can pin to their uniforms as they climb the hierarchy.  

He has been serving as an ambassador for the academy, going around and telling kids who are still vaping their way through online school like he was that there’s another option, another path for them. He got voted onto student council by a landslide.

That happy feeling was fleeting. Kaleb couldn’t maintain the positivity he had at first, not after reality set in and he realized there were still months to go of putting in the work. Some of the cadets piss him off, some of the cadre seem to have it out for him. There are little injustices everywhere.

But he wakes up feeling motivated and proud of himself. He has earned weekly calls home. He feels like before he got to the academy, he was a kid, messing up and goofing off. And now he’s ready to be a man. The future doesn’t scare him anymore.

A summer ago, Kaleb had written out plans for how to exit this world. He had taken a fistful of oxycodone and thrashed out to the middle of this lake near his grandparents’ house even though he’s not a good swimmer. The water there is deep, and Kaleb wanted to sink himself.

He can barely float, but that time, somehow, he just lay on the surface. He felt peaceful, and like God wanted him to live. And now, he wants to live, too. He has a purpose. He’s ready to swim.

Falling off the boat and getting back on

Melissa Turner is so nervous her stomach hurts. She’s wearing three pairs of leggings to ward off the cool breeze of this April morning but she’s shaking anyway, couldn’t sleep at all last night. A few weeks ago the academy told parents they would hold a visitation day, and she’s waiting along with her mom to see Kaleb.

Together, they lugged sub sandwiches and Reubens, egg rolls, pasta with alfredo sauce and a dozen doughnuts over to a picnic table to wait for their cadet to emerge.

They’re ready to see his face, to see how he is, and whether he’s making use of this second chance.

Turner missed hers. Maybe if she had joined the service when her parents encouraged her to 20 years ago — even offering to take care of her son Michael when he was just a toddler — things would have turned out differently.

Maybe she could have escaped the drugs and the toxic relationships, the abuse and the never-ending stream of bills she had to pay with bartending and waitressing tips pocketed while her four kids were left pretty much to raise each other.

As Michael got older, Turner always worried he was going to get himself killed. Fast driving, bad crowd, the kid was reckless — always involving himself in situations he couldn’t get himself out of. She didn’t know how to show him the right path. She’d never been on it.

But after Michael came home from the Michigan Youth Challenge Academy, he was a different guy. She and him started going out for sushi on Friday nights, taking out her parents’ boat together to go fishing. Actually talking, getting close.

Michael’s transformation made Turner think things could be different for Kaleb.

And now here he is, standing at attention, then jogging over to see them, all smiles and nods of pleasure at the taste of his favorite foods and the voices of his friends over FaceTime, though he’s not allowed to touch the phone — academy rules.     

They tell him he looks fresh, dude, as he shows off his trim dress blues. They congratulate him on being sober.

He says people have stolen his clothes, recounts how the other platoon plays pranks on his and complains about bugs in the buildings. He boasts that he can bench press 50% more than when he arrived and claims he has gained 25 pounds of muscle.

He admits he got kicked off student council and keeps getting in trouble for cursing. He has been losing his temper and got punished by having to carry around a 45-pound rucksack. He tells them he falls off the metaphorical boat a few times a day, but he keeps getting back on.

Five weeks left and cadets are getting nervous

Star has been getting a lot of compliments from the cadre on her attitude, which has changed completely from the first weeks when she kept walking off and refusing to train. Her pride, her new outlook — they’re visible on her face; She has caught herself smiling often. Sgt. Sakeeah Lewis noticed she had dimples.

She’s actually going to miss this place.

Graduating from the academy doesn’t fix everything. These kids have changed but they’ll go back to their old lives, their former schools, the familiar temptations. Military school gives them new tools and mindsets, but it isn’t magic.

Some are not used to success and start to self-sabotage. Star doesn’t want to be like that.

She doesn’t want to go back to her former friends. The one she hung all her confidence on but who passed by her mom while Star was away and didn’t even ask about her. She doesn’t want to smoke and drink like she did before, letting it pull her down.

Instead, she’s making plans to finish high school. She’s interested in joining Job Corps to learn welding. Maybe even taking some college classes.

But she’s really scared.

She’s going to miss the cadre. Sgt. Lewis, Sgt. Marie Baynard, the ones to whom she was so disrespectful at first, who looked into her eyes anyway and told her she could do it and made her pinky promise to finish the program.

The ones who came in on their off days to talk her down when she was starting to unravel, and the ones who tell her now that they’re proud of her, that she can do anything, to not let anyone stop her.

That’s what she really needed all along, she realizes now. Someone to open up to. Someone to trust. When she’s up on that graduation stage hearing the words “Cycle 50 dismissed,” the relationships she leaned on to persevere will be severed; Graduates are not permitted to contact cadre members for five years.

Will her self-control be strong enough to keep her on this new path? Will she be able to be this new Star in the same dark sky?

You are dismissed

Terrell Brown is wearing full academic regalia as he takes the podium in the Marshall High School auditorium to give the keynote address at the Michigan Youth Challenge Academy Cycle 50 graduation ceremony.

Dr. Brown, actually. He earned his Ph.D. after serving in the Army reserves and deploying to Iraq. Today, he’s a husband and father, teaches resilience to military personnel and their families, and is CEO of a leadership consulting firm. All of which he might not have believed was possible on the day he graduated from this academy 19 years ago with his GED.

But now, as he looks over at the 116 cadets who are minutes away from accepting a single carnation and a graduation certificate, he can remember the sense of empowerment he felt on that day. He had the skills he needed to build a life for himself. He had earned it.

It doesn’t get easier after the academy, he tells them in his remarks. The challenges keep coming. But now you have a foundation from which to conquer them.

After the speeches have been made and the procession completed, those hard-won high fives and fist bumps happily handed out and the whooping from the audience quieted, the cadet commanding officer takes her place at the front to give the very last command.

A thunder of boots sounds on the stage floor as the graduates anticipate their final order.

“Cycle 50, you are dismissed.”

They fall out with a roar, cheering and clapping following them as they pool in the hallways, throngs of family members pushing their way through the school building to find them. They’re holding gift bags, balloons, bags of gear to take home, plates with red, white and blue cupcakes perched atop.

The cafeteria is madness. Hugs and tears. I love you's and I’m proud of you's turn, over time, into goodbyes as graduates slap each other on the back and take pictures with some of the only other people who will understand the journey they’ve completed, and the one ahead.

“Enjoy your weekends,” one girl calls out into the June sunshine, as the people she has spent 154 days with start dispersing out into the parking lot, into waiting cars, away. “Make good choices for yourself.”

Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at [email protected].