02/06/09 - ATIN - Youth treatment leader Gatehouse Academy has brought Ed Lacy in as CEO, a move that comes at a time when the thriving Wickenburg,AZ-based private center is engaged in a major expansion of capacity and program offerings that has catapulted the center virtually overnight into the ranks of the largest treatment enterprises in the nation.

Clearly, Lacy is excited about the new opportunity and strongly impressed by what he has seen so far at Gatehouse. "There's no question this place rocks," says Lacy, who seemed surprised that he had not previously heard of the center before becoming acquainted recently with founder Ted Earl, who is amongst the earliest pioneers in what is now a multi-billion dollar, nationwide private therapeutic schools marketplace.  The passing of the baton from Earl, a charismatic industry founder and pioneer, to Lacy, a highly experienced industry clinician administrator who has worked in myriad capacities at private centers in markets like Malibu and Arizona, with additional key, and highly prestigious, experience running the Navy's training school for addictions counselors, is a key industry story that is increasingly being played out at addictions centers across the nation in recent years. Treatment Magazine examined this generational baton-passing issue - from charismatic founders to technocratic managers and consolidators - in its December 2007 Special Report: The New Guard.

According to Gatehouse, in its press release accompanying the announcement of Lacy as CEO, the former Marine will be charged with seeing the youth center, which specializes in the high growth, but underserved, college aged addict marketplace, through its next expansion phase. "It's been almost nine years since the conception that is now Gatehouse Academy," says Managing Partner  Kent Sherman, adding that Lacy will focus on such key institutional issues such as the creation of the quality control protocols, and other proceedures and policies, that underpin and make growth sustainable.

And, indeed, the next growth phase is already upon Gatehouse. According to Lacy, bed cpacity skyrocketed last year - from90 beds to 175 beds - amidst an expansion that has brought major new program offerings into the Gatehouse fold, vastly increasing the therapeutic reach of the center and, thus, presumably, its therapeutic effectiveness. One guy who is sold -- Lacy himself. He says he was quite literally moved as he witnessed youth transformation occur during a visit to the center's new wilderness program, which is located in the Canadian northland near Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Newswire Staff

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