We applaud action by Michigan’s governor to create a new committee to fix systemic problems in the state’s juvenile justice and child welfare system.

The shortage of beds in residential facilities for kids is a crisis, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Thursday when she signed the order establishing the Michigan Juvenile Residential Facilities Advisory Committee.

This committee is specifically charged with increasing the quality of treatment. It also may consider creating more space for minors at residential facilities when they need care beyond what they can get at home from community-based services.

It will act in an advisory capacity to the governor within the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the department that oversees the state’s child welfare system.

“The Juvenile Residential Facilities Advisory Committee will build on the recommendations of the Juvenile Justice Reform Task Force and take a comprehensive look at residence standards, staff training, case management and data collection to address the challenges kids in our residential system face,” Whitmer wrote in a statement.

The “Kids in Crisis” project, a collaborative report by the Record-Eagle’s Elizabeth Brewer and Interlochen Public Radio’s Michael Livingston, documented the problems faced by juveniles who get entangled in that system.

What Brewer and Livingston found is that virtually every county in the state is struggling with a lack of placements for these kids. But, in rural northern Michigan, the distance between communities and the lack of available resources make the situation far worse.

Children who enter the juvenile justice system often require mental health treatment. But, of 276 youth inpatient psychiatric beds in the state, only six beds serve the entire northern Lower Michigan and the Upper Peninsula — and all of those are in Marquette.

Other children for whom no placement can be found have been sent out of state at taxpayer expense.

Probate judges implored the state to act months ago. Michigan Supreme Court Associate Justice Elizabeth Clement called the crisis “profound.”

The committee, according to the order signed Thursday, will review “licensing standards for state-run, locally-run and privately-run juvenile justice facilities and make recommendations to improve evidence-based standards for juvenile justice residential placements; review staff training, service standards, length-of-stay guidelines for local detention and residential facilities and make recommendations to improve and strengthen each.”

It also may develop recommendations to support a statewide strategic plan to increase juvenile access to behavioral health beds.

Michigan has inadequate state laws, court rules, and funding incentives to guide the use of residential placements.

“Funding for such placements is only part of the solution,” Clement said. “We must have high, evidence-based standards, a commitment to continuous improvement in quality, ways to measure progress, alternatives to out-of-home placements, and a plan to make sure we are effectively allocating resources to build the nation’s safest, most effective, juvenile residential placement system.”

We agree.

This new state committee has its marching orders. It needs to convene soon and act with dispatch.

— Traverse City Record-Eagle