Newport Academy Lays Off 68 Workers at St. Cloud Teen Treatment Center

(KNSI) – Newport Academy has permanently laid off about 68 workers at its teen mental health and substance use treatment center in south St. Cloud. The layoffs cover jobs across the whole operation, from the residential program director to the people who cooked, cleaned and taught the teens there.

The company, listed as Monroe Operations, LLC, doing business as Newport Healthcare, notified the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development’s State Rapid Response Team of the cuts late Thursday afternoon. According to the federal WARN notice, the layoffs took effect September 30th and October 1st at Newport Academy, 1726 7th Avenue South.

The jobs eliminated include nurse practitioners, licensed practical nurses, therapists, art therapists, licensed alcohol and drug counselors, behavioral health specialists, teachers, a sous chef, housekeepers and security guards. Overnight and residential supervisors and the operations manager were also let go. None of the affected workers belong to a union.

The notice does not give a reason for the layoffs.

Newport, a Nashville-based company majority-owned by Canadian private equity firm Onex, closed nine residential facilities in California and Virginia a year ago as part of a companywide restructuring. At the time, the company said it planned to focus its growth on Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Utah.

The St. Cloud campus has a long history of caring for children. Bishop Joseph Busch of the Diocese of St. Cloud founded the St. Cloud Children’s Home there as an orphanage in 1924, and the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls cared for orphaned children on the property for more than 40 years. In the mid-1960s, Catholic Charities turned it into a residential treatment center for youth, which ran until 2017. The building also housed District 742’s Riverwoods program.

The diocese sold the roughly 40-acre property in the fall of 2020 as part of a $22.5 million trust set up to compensate survivors of clergy sexual abuse. The buyer, Minnesota Health Real Estate Holdings of Irvine, California, paid about $5.4 million and turned control over to Newport, which planned a 60-bed residential center for 30 boys and 30 girls struggling with mental health issues.

Those plans were delayed on April 7th, 2021, when fire broke out in one of the main buildings during renovations. The St. Cloud fire marshal found two points of origin, but the building was too badly damaged for a full investigation, and the cause was never determined.

In January 2022, the diocese and the city dedicated a historical marker along the Beaver Island Trail honoring the Children’s Home and its nearly century of service to young people.

Workers affected by the layoffs can get help through the state’s Dislocated Worker Program.

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