SAUGUS — The town’s schools received a more than $140,000 grant from the federal government, which will be used to bolster social and emotional learning for students.
The funds, which total $141,770, bring the town’s grant balances to over a million dollars, according to Superintendent Erin McMahon. School officials have applied for the competitive grant in years past and been turned down, McMahon said.
She said the grant was identified as a priority because the school district aims to boost students’ recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This is a big deal,” McMahon said. “[We went] after this specifically, because we know as we’re thinking about developing a sense of belonging, we’ve heard over and over from families just how challenging mental health has been for kids, especially coming out of COVID and also just mental health in general. We’re really looking to really create a strong system where we support all kids with their mental health and we provide a tailored solution specifically for our kids who have specific needs.”
Deputy Superintendent Margo Ferrick told the School Committee, who voted to accept the grant at their Dec. 15 meeting, that the funds will be primarily directed toward working with mental health agencies in the community to build school infrastructure that allows the agencies to come in and assist students.
Doing so, Ferrick said, will help “us free up some of the work with our current school adjustment counselors to really work on tier one, universal supports.”
“It supports our students in a way because mental health community partners are skilled and trained really specifically in therapy. They work year-round, they don’t take vacations off, summers off, so it’s for continuity of care. And it really will build a sustainable long-term process of working with our community,” she said.
In response to questioning from School Committee Chair Vincent Serino, Ferrick emphasized that the grant would be primarily directed at building systems in the school that are sustainable and could support the existing counselors working in Saugus.
“It’s all about building infrastructure. So there’s also a continuation grant, so I would predict that we would have this fiscal year and into the next year, but what honestly — I don’t want anybody to think any of our counselors … that anybody’s job is being replaced because that is not the case,” she said. “This is about supporting — actually supporting — our mental health workers by giving them additional resources.”
Ferrick added that some funds will be used to hire a part-time, 19-hour community mental health liaison for each of the town’s three schools. The liaisons would work together “to understand who our community about mental health partners are.”
“Once we create the framework they stay on, they become the conduit of making sure that this doesn’t feel like a burden for the clerk or the school adjustment counselors. And then over time, our goal is that our school adjustment counselors and guidance counselors will spend less time reacting to students because we’re creating the prevention model this way, and maybe in two years, they’ll be able to take on some of the referral process, and we won’t need the community mental health liaison position,” she said. “It was all written with the idea. How do we create a foundation and how is it sustainable over time?”
Serino proposed that the stabilization funding from the Supplemental Student Support Reserve Fund passed by Town Meeting earlier this year be used to create a space in each of the schools for the therapists to work out of, an idea backed by Ferrick.
“It’d be really nice for therapists to have spaces that don’t look like a closet or a classroom,” she said. “That’s the work that has to come in. We have to make sure that it’s prioritized within the buildings.”
“I think once this all gets up and running, it’s going to transform how we look at children and talk about children and be able to meet their own needs,” Ferrick added.
