Water Damage Restoration in Lincoln Park, MI

It’s not too late to give Santa your wish list before he heads back to the North Pole and you don’t want to miss out on a photo op. Here are some spots where you can locate the Jolly Old Elf in Southeast Michigan and Northwest Ohio.

Dundee

Through December 24: Santa at Cabela’s, 110 Cabela Blvd. East in Dundee. There will be holiday giveaways and various craft projects.

Lincoln Park

Fantasyland, 3240 Ferris Ave. in Lincoln Park. Hours are 4-8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; 2-8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Special hours: 4-8 p.m. Dec. 23; 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Dec. 24. Admission: $2 per person. Photos with Santa: $5 each or two for $8.

Monroe

Every Thursday until Christmas (4-7 p.m.): Santa in an Igloo, East Front St. in downtown Monroe.

Santa will be at Mall of Monroe, 2121 N. Monroe St. in Monroe — Visits are free and photo packages are available for purchase. Pet photos with Santa through Dec. 23. Children photos through Dec. 24

Santa will be at Front Street Diner, 1190 W. Front St. in Monroe from 10 a.m. to noon on Dec. 23 enjoying pancakes. Make sure to bring your camera or phone for a photo op.

Taylor

Santa's Magic Forest, Heritage Park Activity Building, 12111 Pardee Road in Taylor. Tentative hours are 5-8 p.m. Fridays, 1-8 p.m. Saturdays and 1-7 p.m. Sundays. Visit with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Admission is $3 -- free for children 3 and under. Photos with Santa by Rosecrans Picture Perfect Photography are $8 each.

Southland Center, 23000 Eureka Road in Taylor. — Through Dec. 24

Tecumseh

Find Santa at the Market on Evans, 213 N. Evans St. He’ll be there 6-8 p.m. Dec. 18; 1-4 p.m. Dec. 21 and Dec. 22.

Trenton

Trenton Cultural Center, 2427 West Road in Trenton. Pictures and wishes with Santa from 2-5 p.m on Dec. 21.

Northwest Ohio

Children’s Wonderland, Sylvania Exhibit Center, 7060 Sylvania Ave, Sylvania, Ohio. Open from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. through Dec. 23; 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Dec. 24. Admission required and photo packages available.

Franklin Park Mall, 5001 Monroe St., Toledo, Ohio — Photos available at Center Court through Dec. 24 at 5 p.m. Your visit with Santa is free, photo packages will be available for purchase.

The Shops at Fallen Timbers, 3100 Main St., Suite 1599 Maumee, Ohio — Through Dec. 24. Book photo packages online.

Lincoln Park — An intervention program designed to find and thwart the next school shooter in Michigan has moved into its first Metro Detroit school district to train employees in a first-of-its-kind model in the nation.

Prevent 2 Protect is a $15 million project funded by the Michigan Department of Education that is designed to prevent acts of adolescent violence and increase school safety.

The five-year pilot pulls together the expertise of mental health providers, law enforcement and educators at a research-to-practice hub at Michigan State University’s department of psychiatry.

The program, which started in the 2022-23 school year, focuses on early intervention and providing long-term intervention supports such as mentoring and mental health treatment for the student and services for their family.

It operates four regional teams, one at Lincoln Park Public Schools, which started earlier this year, and three teams inside intermediate school districts across the state — Ingham County ISD, Calhoun ISD and West Shore ESD.

It has received 69 referrals for high-risk middle and high school kids as of April, determined 36 of those were eligible for the program and has 28 active adolescents it is supporting and mentoring, program officials said.

Kids who have been referred to the program either threatened to bring a gun to school, pretended to have a gun in school, committed assault in school, made a bomb threat or created a "hit list."

Just last week, a Michigan superintendent discovered a "kill list" written by a student in Memphis Community Schools. The list, titled "Kill List Today," was reported by another student to an anonymous tipline.

According to the program's director, Dr. Alyse Folio Ley, an associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at MSU, the program in its first year averted two planned attacks, a suicide plan and a case of child abuse/neglect where the child had access to weapons.

"There's lots of research on this. Now, we know about averted attacks, we know about gun violence, but what are we doing to stop this?" Ley said during a training session on April 22 at Lincoln Park schools.

"So years and years ago, we put together a model, which now is Prevent 2 Protect, and that model is of intensive supports," Ley said. "It involves systems navigation, and it involves mentorship of young people. Our belief is that one adult, one person, can change the trajectory of a kid's life."

Once a student is identified by their local district and deemed eligible by Prevent 2 Protect, the program starts with a multi-disciplinary assessment at MSU that includes a psychiatric social needs assessment for the child. The team gathers all records and documents it can about the student and creates an individualized care plan that is shared with the student's school district.

"We want to know everything we can possibly find out about the kid, everything," Ley said. "So we try to get even pediatric records, community mental health records, interviews with law enforcement."

The hub helps Michigan school districts establish Intensive Support Teams for the students and their families. Those teams conduct ongoing risk and needs assessments and coordinate individual care plans that may include medical, mental health, education and employment services for the family.

Part of the program helps families navigate the multiple systems required to get their child the help they need. It includes housing families in hotels during assessments and gas cards to travel to MSU.

Students are supposed to be identified for the program through their school district's threat assessment team, but Ley said a lack of standardized protocols and threat assessments across the state makes that challenging. Plus, school staffers who are team members leave the district for other jobs.

"I think we're at the infancy of implementing behavioral threat assessment across the state of Michigan," Ley said. "I think Michigan is ahead of some states, way ahead, and that's due to the Office of School Safety and all the work that they have done."

All Michigan schools are required by law, no later than Oct. 1, 2026, to establish a behavior threat assessment and management team, under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's "School Safety" package that was signed into law in January.

Each team, which the district must staff and train, is tasked with monitoring concerning behaviors by students, implementing supportive measures to mitigate potential threats and providing students with the tools they need to thrive. The law applies to public and nonpublic schools.

Ley does not think the state should mandate one model for all. The research is out there, Ley said, and she knows several models are good at where they operate.

"We know that different school districts have different resources, so it's hard to say that everybody needs to do the exact same thing, because then we have different populations," Ley said. "Everyone should be trained in behavioral threat assessment. Everyone should be prepared for the event that there is a threat."

Lincoln Park's model

Lincoln Park, a district of 5,000 students in Wayne County, was chosen to participate in Prevent 2 Protect for its long-standing and thorough process for identifying and assessing a threat of targeted violence, Ley said. It has had a robust threat assessment program in place and operating since 2018.

"Lincoln Park has had a well-established behavioral threat assessment team, a system in place, policies and procedures for many years," Ley said. "It's comprehensive. It's well explained. It's well organized. They deploy the teams easily."

Nicole Chubb, Lincoln Park's executive director of special education, said her district has had systems in place around threat assessments, trauma-informed practices and mental health for students for a long time before most Michigan districts did.

The team consists of social workers, resource officers, the superintendent and a school administrator who work collaboratively to develop the threat protocol to respond to a student who makes a targeted threat or some kind of threat towards the school environment, another student or someone within the community.

The team determines if the student needs to be sent for further assessment or if it's a transient or low-risk threat. All school staff are trained on all the district's protocols.

Chubb said that when a student does return to school, school staff performs a reentry meeting that includes a safety plan.

"You know we will put other supports in place," Chubb said. "We connect students with mental health agencies. We do have quite a few social workers in our district. So there will be follow-up with that student with the parent."

Davida Colbert, superintendent of the Wayne RESA, told The News that Lincoln Park Public Schools was selected as the regional partner for Prevent 2 Protect due to the school district's central role in delivering educational services to 23 school districts across Wayne County. This includes specialized programming for students with severe emotional impairments.

"Prevent 2 Protect is a valuable new resource available to school districts, aimed at enhancing support for students and families," Colbert said in a statement. "Through this initiative, two additional support personnel, a mentor and a case manager, have been assigned to serve the region, providing direct assistance and guidance to those in need."

Terry Dangerfield, superintendent of Lincoln Park Public Schools, told The News in a statement that the district continuously builds on its school safety protocols to help ensure a safe and nurturing learning environment for students, staff and families.

"This includes implementation of our 2018 threat assessment protocols, which allow us to quickly respond to threatening language or behavior of any kind. This is made possible by collaboration among our highly trained administrators, mental health professionals, and law enforcement to promote a safe school environment," Dangerfield said.

Asked if the district made any changes in its threat assessment practices in response to actual school violence in Michigan and nationwide, Dangerfield said Lincoln Park Public Schools continuously adapts to those threats to help keep the school community safe.

"We regularly monitor our safety protocols using best practices, including analyzing data and information from tragic events in other districts," he said.

Dangerfield said Prevent 2 Protect adds an extra layer of resources to further enhance school safety.

"Prevent 2 Protect allows our students at greatest risk to receive intensive services that may not otherwise be available to them," Dangerfield said.

jchambers@detroitnews.com

DePaul Art Museum > Exhibitions > tengo-lincoln-park-en-mi-corazón-young-lords-in-chicago

​September 11, 2025—February 8, 2026

Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón: Young Lords in Chicago explores the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) trajectory in the Lincoln Park neighborhood amidst gentrification and urban renewal, which displaced the vibrant Puerto Rican community of the 1950s and 1960s. Originally a street gang, the Young Lords transformed into a prominent civil rights organization. The exhibition explores the origins of the movement, emphasizing the concept of counter-mapping as a means of activism and community empowerment. Counter-maps are cartographies that reveal the knowledge and resistance of communities, challenging historical displacement and invisibility imposed by traditional maps.

The exhibition will feature historical artifacts and multimedia installation for visitors to engage with the intersections of history, activism, and the geography of memory within one of the most influential movements in Latinx civil rights history, deeply rooted in a distinctive Chicago neighborhood. DePaul was one of several institutions that benefited from displacing the Puerto Rican barrio and other working-class communities in Lincoln Park. The Young Lords held these institutions accountable. Notably, the group occupied the Stone Administration Building at McCormick Seminary in May 1969 (now DePaul's School of Music North Building) and it remains one of the last structures in Lincoln Park directly linked to the YLO and attracts visitors interested in this history.​

Tengo Lincoln Park en mi Corazón: Young Lords in Chicago is curated by DePaul University Professor Jacqueline Lazú and organized by DePaul Art Museum.

Image credit: Young Lords members protesting the Vietnam War in a march from Lincoln Park to Humboldt Park, 1969. ST-70004742-0005, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum.