LYNN — With a new school year right around the corner, former Superintendent of Schools Dr. Patrick Tutwiler said that this fall there will be one social worker for every 250 students in the Lynn Public Schools system.
Tutwiler said that the city invested just under $8 million in school clinical workers for the 2022-2023 school year. In an interview earlier this month, he said that LPS clinical staff has nearly quadrupled over the last seven years.
“In the past seven or eight years, we have increased the number of clinical staff in the Lynn Public Schools by 400 percent, and that’s not an exaggeration,” Tutwiler said.
Tutwiler added that this coming school year, LPS will hit the national recommendation for student-to-clinician ratios in schools.
“This is a different, more involved layer of support and awareness on each campus in this district for us to understand more deeply where students are, and to attach them or acquaint them with support, them and their families,” Tutwiler said.
He added that a simple check-in with students at the beginning and end of each day makes it easier for the school system to identify potential threats to students’ wellbeing or mental health.
“There’s a check in at the beginning of every school day, there’s a checkout or exit experience at the end of every school day and gives teachers an opportunity to connect with individual students and assess how they’re doing. Same thing at the secondary level, middle and high school. We have advisories which are smaller groups that meet with staff as usually curriculum that’s attached to it,” Tutwiler said.
Mayor Jared Nicholson said that The Student Opportunity Act, which was signed in the fall of 2019 to provide approximately $2 billion in state funding for local school districts, made expansions in school-based mental health care possible over the years.
“It has been a huge priority and shift over the years to elevate the social emotional part of education, and the school department has been fortunate to be able to make this kind of investment, in part through The Student Opportunity Act, to do the hiring that it has over the last couple of years in this area. I’m very grateful to see the fact that we’ve been prioritizing social emotional [issues] and the fact that we have the resources to do it. It’s been really positive,” Nicholson said.
Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at [email protected]. Charlie McKenna can be reached at [email protected].
