SAUGUS — The School Committee heard a status update on the Community Mental Health Liaison program in the town’s public schools, which seeks to create a partnership between the schools and outside clinicians to provide therapy and other support services to students.
Bernadette Peeples and Danielle Pierce, two of the four liaisons hired to facilitate the program, delivered the update to the committee Thursday. The program is funded by a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education grant that runs through the end of fiscal year 2023, though Peeples and Pierce said they expected the town would once again receive funding for the following fiscal year.
The four liaisons were onboarded in February and assigned to each of the town’s schools. Since then, Pierce and Peeples told the committee, they had nailed down two partnerships with outside clinics — the Justice Resource Institute’s Children’s Friend and Family Services in Lynn, and Embrace Pathways in Peabody — that are already at work in the schools. As of the committee meeting Thursday, nine clinicians were based across the four schools.
“This program … provides students with consistent therapy each week, same time, same place, same therapists,” Pierce said. “The agencies that we’ve partnered with are really offering wraparound services, they’re communicating with the families, they’re communicating with our guidance counselors and our adjustment counselors, they’re bridging the gap.”
The initiative is insurance-based, meaning there is no additional strain on the district’s budget for the additional services. Both clinics hired so far accept MassHealth and a variety of private insurances, Pierce said.
Fifty Saugus students are served by the program as it stands, with 16 High School students, 14 Middle School students, 12 students at the Belmonte STEAM Academy, and eight students at the Veterans Early Learning Center comprising the group. Students are referred to clinicians by the existing support teams in the schools, and the long-term goal is to get the program up to a level where parents can refer their children directly.
“This initiative, it really allows the guidance counselors and adjustment counselors to focus on what they were hired to do, instead of being pulled with their limbs every other way each day,” Pierce said.
Peeples said some of the clinicians are bilingual and biracial, and that they come from a variety of backgrounds.
“We really wanted to make sure that whoever we were bringing in was going to be a good match for the young people that we’re working with,” she said.
The long-term goal would be to embed the clinicians in the schools to the point that they make them their offices, and the need for liaisons like Pierce and Peeples as a go-between can be removed.
“We want this model to be sustainable, regardless of if we’re here or not,” Pierce said.
The clinical services will remain available to students through the summer, and Peeples said she and the rest of the liaisons will continue to work to expand the program, bringing in more community partners and building out additional professional development opportunities for staff.
The liaisons earned praise from members of the committee, with Chairman Vincent Serino saying “this is yeoman’s work, I really appreciate it.”
Committee member Dennis Gould appeared concerned about the sustainability of continuing the program should the grant funding run out, but Serino and Acting Superintendent of Schools Michael Hashem appeared confident funding sources would be identified to keep the work going.
“This is going to be an area of need for our students moving forward. I don’t see it being less in the future,” Hashem said. “The mental health problems that I think have always been there were exacerbated by COVID, they’re coming to light right now. But our hope is to continue this and this is something that we will find funding for one way or another.”
