Michigan’s day program landscape after prevocational services disappeared
Michigan removed Prevocational Services from the Habilitation Supports Waiver in the renewal effective October 2024 and gave families six months to land somewhere else. Here is what is actually left, and how the replacements differ.
Not which building they go to. Which service. Prevocational Services, Skill Building, Out-of-Home Non-Vocational Habilitation, Community Living Supports, and Supported Employment are five different things with five different rules, and families are routinely told “the day program” as if that were an answer. Email your supports coordinator and ask for the service name, the authorized units, and the effective dates in writing. Everything downstream depends on knowing that one fact.
What was removed
Prevocational Services, the waiver service that funded work-readiness activity in a facility setting, is no longer a covered service under Michigan’s Habilitation Supports Waiver.
Skill Building
A 1915(i) State Plan service. It is not waiver-slot dependent, which matters, because State Plan services are an entitlement for those who meet criteria rather than a capped slot.
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Out-of-home hab
Out-of-Home Non-Vocational Habilitation covers structured, non-work daytime support outside the home. This is the closest thing to a traditional day program that survives in the array.
The paperwork trail
MDHHS Project 2533-BH formalizes the removal in policy. If your CMH tells you nothing changed, that project number is the thing to cite back.
The real bottleneck
The waiver array is not the constraint anymore. Provider capacity is. A service can be covered, authorized, and completely unavailable in your county at the same time.
Who is still operating
WMU Center for Disability Services, Gesher Human Services, Judson Center, and Dutton Farm are among the Michigan organizations still running structured adult day programming.
The five services families confuse
Removed from the HSW, October 2024
1915(i) State Plan, community and site based
Structured non-work day support, out of home
Daily living and community participation
Targets competitive integrated employment
Two to six workers, explicitly not CIE
Six months from the effective date
MDHHS Project 2533-BH
Nadia’s son Owen has gone to the same building on the same street four days a week for six years. In 2025 the letterhead on his plan changed, the service name changed, the authorized units dropped, and the van route got cut to three days. Nobody told her a waiver had been renewed. She found out because the billing code on a statement did not match the one on last year’s statement.
Find out what your adult child actually has, then protect it
The order to do this in
- 1Email your supports coordinator for the service name.
- 2Request the current IPOS and the prior year’s IPOS.
- 3Compare authorized units line by line.
- 4Ask in writing why any unit count dropped.
- 5If units dropped without a planning meeting, object.
- 6Request an Adequate Action Notice, then appeal.
Questions to ask about any replacement
- Is this a waiver service or a State Plan service?
- How many hours per week are authorized?
- Is transportation included or separate?
- What is the staff to participant ratio?
- Is the site currently accepting new participants?
- What happens if the provider closes this location?
- Does this count as a residential or day setting?
- Who signs off if we want to change providers?
A service change without a person-centered planning meeting and a written notice is not a service change. It is a paperwork error you are entitled to contest.
Michigan did not announce the end of Prevocational Services with a press conference. It ended it in a waiver renewal document, approved in December 2024, effective retroactively to October 2024, with a six-month transition period that started before most families knew there was anything to transition from. If you want to understand how services disappear in this state, that sentence is the whole method.
What a waiver renewal actually is
Every few years, Michigan has to ask the federal government to renew its Habilitation Supports Waiver. The renewal application lists which services the waiver will cover, how many people it will serve, and what it will pay. It is a long technical document that almost nobody outside the system reads.
That document is where services live and die. When the state removed Prevocational Services from the covered array in the renewal approved in December 2024 and made effective October 1, 2024, that was the decision. There was no vote. There was no hearing where a room full of parents got to say what the service meant to their adult children. There was a renewal application and a federal approval.
MDHHS then issued policy, tracked under Project 2533-BH, formalizing the removal and describing the six-month transition period for people who had been receiving Prevocational Services. If your Community Mental Health agency has been vague with you about what happened, that project number is the citation. Ask for it by name.
What the two replacements actually are
The state named two landing spots. They are not the same thing, and the difference matters more than anything else in this post.
Skill Building is a 1915(i) State Plan service. State Plan services are not waiver-slot dependent. If you meet the criteria, you are entitled to the service, which is a fundamentally different legal posture than waiting for a capped waiver slot. Skill Building funds structured activity aimed at developing skills, and can be delivered in the community or at a site.
Out-of-Home Non-Vocational Habilitation is what most families would recognize as a day program. Structured daytime support, outside the home, with no work requirement attached. If your adult child was going to a facility five days a week for something that was never really about employment, this is the honest name for it.
Then there are the services that were always separate and are now doing extra work by default. Community Living Supports covers daily living and community participation. Individual Supported Employment targets competitive integrated employment. Small Group Employment covers two to six workers and is explicitly not competitive integrated employment, which is the state saying out loud that it knows the employment paradigm does not fit everyone.
The honest part nobody puts in the bulletin
Here is where I stop explaining policy and start telling you what actually happens.
The service array is not your problem anymore. Provider capacity is. A service can be covered by the waiver, authorized on your adult child’s plan, and completely unavailable within an hour’s drive, all at the same time. That is not a contradiction in the system. That is the system.
So when a supports coordinator tells you Skill Building is available, the follow-up question is not whether it is covered. It is whether any provider in your PIHP region is currently accepting new participants, and how many days a week they can actually staff.
Who is still operating in Michigan
Structured adult day programming still exists in this state. It is uneven, geographically concentrated, and often full, but it exists, and families deserve names rather than a suggestion to “explore options.”
Western Michigan University runs Disability Services and Adult Wellness Programs in Kalamazoo, including a Community Connections Skill Building program built around the current service definitions. Gesher Human Services operates community integration and adult day programming in metro Detroit. Judson Center provides disability support services across several southeast Michigan counties. Dutton Farm in Rochester runs day programming and vocational activity for adults with disabilities.
That is not a complete list and it is not an endorsement. It is a starting set of real organizations, currently operating, that you can call this week. When you call, ask the same four questions every time. Do you have current openings. How many days a week can you staff. What is your ratio. What is your transportation situation.
Then write the answers down with the date, because provider capacity in Michigan changes month to month and you will want to know what they told you in March when it is June.
Your practical next steps
This week. Email your supports coordinator and ask, in writing, what service your adult child is currently authorized for, how many units, and through what date. Ask specifically whether the service changed as a result of the October 2024 waiver renewal. Save the reply.
Next week. Pull the current Individual Plan of Service and last year’s. Put them side by side and compare authorized units line by line. If anything dropped, that drop should have come with a person-centered planning meeting and a written Adequate Action Notice explaining your appeal rights. If it did not, you have a due process problem, not just a service problem.
Ongoing. Call three providers a month and log what they tell you. Capacity opens quietly and closes quietly. The families who get slots are usually the families who called the week the slot opened, and there is no notification system that will do that for you.
Michigan chose to remove Prevocational Services. It could have chosen to redefine it, fund it differently, or phase it out over three years with a capacity build behind it. Other states restructured without a hard removal. At every decision point, different choices were available. Michigan made this one, and the six-month clock ran on families who never knew it started.