[SPEAKER_13]: Mary Ann can't make it all be turned today as co chair of the commission. Just read this pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. This meeting of the Medford promote prevent support behavioral health commission will be conducted via remote means members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so by accessing meeting link contain hearing no in person attendance of members of the public will be permitted and public participation, any public hearing during the meeting shall be by remote means only. Do we have to take an attendance. Yes. Okay, let's all turn this over to pay to take care of that and we'll start Mariana Connor.
[Funaiole]: Not here. Chief Buckley. Not here. Chief Friedman.
[SPEAKER_00]: I supposed to say here. I'm here.
[Funaiole]: I think so. I think. OK. Superintendent Edouard Vincent. Not here. Penelope Bonilla. I'm here. Neil Osborne.
[Osborne]: Neil's here.
[Funaiole]: Pam Kelly. Yeah. Stacey Shulman. I'm here. Thank you. Richard Raymond.
[Unidentified]: I'm here. Thank you.
[Funaiole]: Ian Wong.
[Unidentified]: Here.
[Funaiole]: And Manavi Dacal. Not here. Maria Dorsey.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Here.
[Funaiole]: Thank you. Anshika Hansen Burma. I did get a notice she will be coming soon. And Patricia Brady. Not here. And then that's the official roll call. And we have community members here in attendance as well.
[SPEAKER_13]: Okay. So as I said, Marianne couldn't make it today, so I'll be chairing the meeting. Okay. I think everybody knows each other. So let me turn it over to Penny again for the approval of the minutes.
[Funaiole]: Okay, everybody, the minutes from the previous meeting, I did send things out, I apologize, it was not as advanced notice as I would have liked. But here are the minutes from the March 2nd meeting. These are the folks that were in attendance. We had presentations on culturally competent connections to care report, we discussed the vision mission value statements, and we reviewed, we set goals and objectives for the commission. These are the goals and objectives. And that's it. Any questions? or comments.
[SPEAKER_13]: Does someone want to make a motion to approve the minutes?
[Osborne]: He'll make that motion.
[SPEAKER_13]: Who did that? Neil.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_13]: Neil makes a motion. Someone can second.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Pam Kelly second the motion.
[SPEAKER_13]: Any comments, questions? No. Okay. Penny, can you take a vote?
[Funaiole]: Yes. I only vote on who's here, right? Okay, thank you. Chief Buckley.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Chief Friedman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Penelope Fanigli. Yes. Neil Osborne. Yes. Pam seconded. Stacey Shulman. Yes. Richard Raymond.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Ian Wong.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Maria Dorsey. Yes. Okay.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thank you, Penny. This is always a funny part because I'm looking for Stacy. So if you see me, can I move my head around? I'm trying to look at all the squares. I apologize. I look like I'm jerking around here. So I think next on the agenda here, school updates on behavioral health programming care. Stacy, I think that's you.
[Schulman]: Yeah, sure. Um, so what I'm going to talk a little bit about today is our the Metro Public Schools partnership with care solace, and the gap that care solace is filling for us is working hard to connect students, their families and staff with. with a therapist in the community, either for mental health or substance use. There are two forms that they can access this service, and I'm going to walk you through all of it. I'm going to share my screen if that's all right. So the first thing is this is what we sent out to all of our families and our staff, along with a message. It was translated into our top three languages of Portuguese, Haitian, Creole, and Arabic. And families can either access the service themselves by going online. I'll show that to you next. Or they can connect with either an administrator, assistant principals, principals, or a Councilor. All counseling staff have ability to do what I'm going to show you as a warm handoff. If people are searching on their own, they go to our Medford public school site or Medford site, and this is what it looks like. And it basically starts by asking you the question, what are you struggling with? So you could click on which one. So we'll just say anxiety here. And then you go to the next step. It asks you for severity. We'll go for medium. Has the person seen the therapist before? No. Gender identity. Age, we'll just do adults. It asks you for your ethnicity. And then it asks you for insurance. I'm just going to press I don't know. And then it asks you for your zip code, how far you're willing to travel, and who it's for. So it's for myself or a staff member, right, student or staff member. I'll just press student. And what this does is it pulls up the both how you book an appointment so that you could call care cells directly and that they'll assist you, or you can go through and scan yourself. So you can say, oh, these are the providers near me that may be able to assist me. I'm gonna make these phone calls on my behalf, or I wanna start searching for who they are. The other option is either you call them directly and give them the same information, they'll start calling on your behalf to make appointments. So sometimes I'll get a call from a provider in our area and they say, are you working with this agency? Because they're calling saying they're trying to book an appointment for an adolescent who's at Medford High School. And I'll say, yes. They are assisting us but you need to talk with them as far as like insurance and payment work directly with the agency, who will then get consent from either the student if they're over 18 or their parent. And the goal here is that eventually over some back and forth and I'll show you. how many calls and emails they're making in a second, they will eventually call back and say, great, you know, we have an appointment for you in two weeks or two months or three months or whatever it is with this provider. Are you willing to accept it? And you can say yes or you can say no. And so we've had people decline services by saying, you know, no, it's too far or yes, that sounds great. And then they'll respond back if it was a warm handoff through the school saying, we found this person a provider, they have an appointment in two months. CARESOLS also follows up with the person either after they have their appointment and they say, do you like this person? Did you like your appointment? And if they say yes, they consider that case closed. And if they say no, they start looking for somebody else. So again, you can either search on your own or go through the warm handoff process. So this is my. and you can see it says school staff login. I can't show it to you because it has people's information on it, but essentially what it pulls up is my next screen, which says all of the people that I've referred and what their status is. It also gives me a breakdown of when exactly Care Solace talked to the person that I referred, who they've tried to contact for an appointment and when and what the method was. So it'll say text message to student, text message to parent, email the parent, email the provider, and it gives the people's names for it. So as you can imagine, we've been using it quite a bit. I'm going to show you what our usage is in one second. Let me just get out of here a little bit. I need this to go away. I'm just going to stop sharing my screen for one second so I can access it, then I'll pull it back up. So this is Medford public schools usage. And here are the top indicators. Just to give you a sense, we started using this in February. So that's why there's no data before that time. And it wasn't even in the beginning of February, it was towards the middle of it. This tells you how many inbound interactions. That means how many people have called Care Solace for assistance, how many calls there were. But these are what we wanna focus on. So the warm handoffs are how many people have been referred personally by Medford Public Schools staff, how many were done. So we had 43 in February, 45 in March, 37 in April, and one so far in May. Of course, we haven't gotten that far. And here is the key point here. How many actual appointments into care were made? So out of the 43 in February, seven appointments were made in February. So some of these carry over and so on. But if you notice, we've done 136 warm handoffs and only 40 appointments were made. And this is indicative of a problem which is twofold. One is people will agree to a warm handoff for us to say, look, we're going to, we're going to do, you know, we can have people who can search for a therapist for you to assist you in the community. They'll say, that's great. And either they don't respond to calls from Care Solace, or they aren't actually interested in making that appointment. The other challenge that they have is they may do a search on their own. and say, you know what, I'm going to go through my pediatrician's office and decline services through Care Solace, or Care Solace is still working on trying to find a provider. So it's great. It's assisting us. I love them. But the challenge is they're pulling from a dry well, like all of us. There just isn't the care out there. I'll walk you through a little bit more as far as what these indicators show us, who's being referred, because I think it tells us a good story here. So if you look at the gender breakdown, 63% of females, 34 male, 3% non-binary, I think that's a typical breakdown of what we're looking for. I think in our society, we're still looking at a situation where females are more apt to seek care, mental health care. But in terms of age groups who we've referred so far, 28% of our referrals have been for adults. So either adults within our school or caregivers for our students, parents, caregivers, grandparents. The largest group, which is no surprise to me, though I expected it to be larger, is 45% have been adolescents 12 to 17. And then 27%, which I was surprised about, that's a higher group of three to 11. So those are our littlest learners here. And then they talk about, Substance use, who we've referred 3%, marijuana use referral, very minimal. And the insurances and who the providers are who are taking people. So you can see the larger agencies here, North Shore, mental health. Family Counseling Associates, Cora Spillman has taken quite a few. Trinity Care, the larger agencies are more likely to be accepting people, which is of no surprise. If you have more providers, you are more likely to have appointments down the line. And then I'm not surprised by what they're referring for in terms of mental health. Anxiety is gonna be our top contender these days. And you'll notice it doesn't add up to 100%. People are clicking on more than one area here. So 8% marital disruptive, trauma, 27% depression and anxiety. That's the breakdown that I expected here. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and I'll answer. Any questions you all have?
[Osborne]: Stacey, I guess I'm curious about folks who don't have any insurance. It's sort of the program sort of reducing the friction between someone who thinks they might need help and an avenue to get it. But I'm also thinking about families that don't have the insurance to get the help.
[Schulman]: That's right. So, ideally, we would cross that bridge before we're making that referral. And for someone to say I don't have insurance, and then problem solve around that at the school level, either by assisting them with accessing insurance or mass health. or problem solving in another way, or if they're searching on their own and they allow us to be a partner with them, they would say, we don't have insurance. And then they would come back to us and say, hey, your warm handoff responded back to us stating that they're not accessing care because they don't have insurance. And then we work with the family around that. But that's a great question. I mean, the back and forth communication with Care Solace, like we are, it is a real in time moment. So Neil, if you were, if I was referring you, your name is on my screen and it tells me every time they're contacting you. And then they have a blurb out to me to say, oh, by the way, there's an insurance challenge here. Can you help us with this? And then we problem solve from there. But this is solving the gap of both parents and students not knowing how to navigate the system or even who to contact for it. And Councilors, frankly, just don't have the time to make 15 phone calls a day for one family. So we're sending resources to them over and over again, but we don't have the time to make those individual phone calls when they're not always connected, unless it's to a big partner for a specific service that we are saying, oh, this is the niche that you fall into. We know exactly. who to refer you to here. But again, there are only so many appointments. And so many appointments that fit into people's schedules, too. That's the other challenge that we have, right? It's like they're coming back and saying, hey, we have an appointment, Stacey, for you at 10 AM on a Wednesday. And I'm saying, I can't do that because of my job, too. So that's another challenge that we're seeing. But it all gives us information for, obviously, this group I mean, I don't think I'm telling you much you don't already know in terms of there's a provider limitation that's national. But it's interesting to see certainly like why people aren't accessing care or what the very specific barriers are there.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Stacey, just as you were clicking out of your sharing screen, I noticed I landed on the suicidal number and I did not take in what the breakdown was as far as an age group or... Oh, I can pull that up again. Do you want to look at that again? And I'm just curious, too, if that was an expected number. I thought it seemed... I think it was over 10%, wasn't it?
[Schulman]: For, for what part sorry Maria my, I'm looking at the, at the suicidal number. Oh, um, no that unfortunately to me that's that's not unexpected 5% I think is lower.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Okay.
[Schulman]: Yeah. So for. Benchmark data on suicidality, one pinpoint I have is that this year we did depression screening. Within one week, we screened 800 high school students just for that week, and I sent eight people out for an ambulance. So I'm unfortunately, and maybe I'm just more weathered from doing this, but there are a lot of people who are very sad and do not know how to solve those problems and think about killing themselves. And so 5% is not high.
[bq-gVu-g8qk_SPEAKER_26]: Stacey, does that suicide number reflect active plans or?
[Schulman]: So the data of care solace is sort of like, why are you making this referral? And the other reason why 5% for suicide is low is because care solace wouldn't be my first step. So if someone came to me and they're saying they're suicidal, I'm choosing another avenue to get them assistance more quickly. I'm not saying, oh, great, I'm gonna refer you to this agency who may get you care in two months, right? Now, what that breakdown could be is they could say, my child was recently sent out on an ambulance for being suicidal and I'm seeking help for that, right? So the information they give us is great. This is a real active in time. I can pull up this utilization method constantly, but it's not perfect in terms of exactly what it means. It just gives us a general sense.
[bq-gVu-g8qk_SPEAKER_26]: Well, it's also hard to find people right now to provide therapy. Yeah, I'm going to hire two brand new people. And I'm thrilled because I know that's going to open up potentially 30 more slots. But it's truly a crisis. And as we look towards the summer months, these kids are not going to be as visible in the community. And what kind of effort can we make through this body to do outreach, both for children and adults, I know I wanted to bring this up today. I was in Medford Square a couple of weekends ago on Riverside Avenue, and I was really troubled by the number of individuals who are outside clearly either high under the influence in a mentally unstable place. And I happened to be talking to the business owner who said it's a constant worry for them. Like they saw the police take out one person earlier in the week and that person was back three days later, which is very typical. That's a typical course, but What outreach can we do and make that a priority perhaps out of the subcommittee? How do we do more? And it's more of a preventative model, right? That's a crisis response, but how can we help prevent some of these crises? And I'd like to think that as even next year comes that we are better equipped to provide more resources to families you know, through the schools and what have you, but it's a real crisis. I mean, I was late getting on and I'm going to be off at two o'clock because I am so back to back with mental health services.
[Schulman]: I mean, I will say, and I've said this before, it's the time out of school and it's the summertime. It's the time that school is not in session is the concern. I mean, we are by far the largest agency providing care in Medford. I have 42 staff members in the Counseling and Behavioral Health Department. When students attend schools, they have people there to support them, right? but it's the time in the summer and the time after school is where our challenge. And school is also not appropriate for students to manage all of their mental health care, right? Like our job is to get them to access academics. That's our job and to provide education around supports, but we need to be able to connect them with community resources to manage family systems challenges, pervasive mental health difficulties. And hopefully we're working to prevent our students from having intensive mental health care through the preventative work of, you know, triaging counseling services and education and health and all of those providers, but it is the community-based services, which is where the deficit is. And I wish I had an answer to it.
[SPEAKER_13]: You know, thanks, Stacy, because yeah, that'd be my interest too, how we could look at the information and create those preventative programs. So, you know, for those students who haven't got to that point yet, but we can see, hey, depression's a big piece in this age group. How can we put together those support systems, you know, other things that, you know, basically, so, you know, we can interact with students earlier, because I think we're all so busy. that it's hard to reach everybody all the time, but it'd be interesting to look at the data and say, hey, we have to do, you know, more information, again, about depression or other things and kind of help students, you know, prior, and again, connect them to programs, be it either, you know, mental health programs or just other programs that can help students. You know, keep from sliding into.
[Schulman]: I hear what you're saying, but I will push back a little bit to say those who are involved in school, our school age community members are the most attached to services that we have. It's our adults that are caring for students, it's our elderly, that is where the gap is. So, you know, I, we use this data all the time as a school to look and say like how, what do we need more to provide. But, and I'm happy to provide information. But what I hear from families all the time is that it's the outside of school providers, that's where the gap is, who do they see for mental health services outside, and where is our assistance. Otherwise,
[Funaiole]: I'd like to add a few things, there was a lot, a lot has been said, I'd like to add that. So what I want to say is, number one, I want to address the people who do congregate in our community. We are very much on top of that. Alicia is here. Alicia meets with the majority of the people that you would visibly see out. We meet with them weekly. We meet with them individually. We meet with them in a group. We are way on top of that, and we are doing what we can. But we have to remember, we meet people where they're at, and sometimes they're not at that place to get You know, we're really growing with these people so we're really very much intentionally working on that. I couldn't agree with Stacey more, we want to make sure that we're supporting the family unit on the community side, and we need to continue to figure that out. We are figuring it out through other creative, different kind of perspectives and methods. Number one, we need to create community in the city of Medford. We need to have places of community, so community centers, community spaces. So we're working on a major, major project with multiple departments called resiliency hubs, we're calling it the interconnected resiliency network. So if there are locations where there are typical activities where people go for social engagement, they will also be connected to an access to services, right? So how do I, you know, there's within this interconnected, how do you get hooked up with the mystic community market for food? How do you get hooked up with Mr. Mystic Valley Elder Services? If there's an elevated level of crisis, this person needs attention right now. The police and the health department have the hub meeting that has 20 providers come to that meeting every Tuesday. And we get people immediate, address the situation immediately. So we do have a lot. And this goes back to, again, we've got to map out what we're doing, look at it in totality, see where the gaps are. And then also looking at the data to understand what is the, like, what are the issues as a baseline and then what are the continuingly like spiking of issues. We've had a number of suicides in this community over the last couple months. That's a major concern and I, you know, and I was really happy I got on a call with Stacy right away, and we talked about what the school is doing, but you know there's a lot more that needs to be done. And then finally I want to say too, is that the chief and I have reached out to care solace to look at the community as a whole, to have access to care solace, and they want to, this is something that this would be a new venture for care solace, so they've given us a streamline price the price is way higher grant funding that we currently have to put towards this. But what I was very impressed about was the money that we got was for Interface, which is very local. William James College runs Interface. They're backlogged, you know, half a month before they'll even call you to intake you, right? They're, you know, but they also don't run 24 7365 days a week, plus. So, so when I went through the presentation with yourself that was very, very attractive that people who work, you know, all night and get home at 3am and they're having crisis they can call and they're still going to get that level of care that we really want to see. So I would put the bee in everyone's bonnet here that this commission should likely be requesting from the ARPA funds to fund that program if we really feel that that is something that's very important to ensure that because the access is only right now to families. staff and children are the public schools. So we still have a great deal of elders that need that kind of support, need to get that kind of navigation. And then just anyone who's not interconnected with the school system should have access to this kind of triaging. So we would love to see that, I think, but based on the current funding that we were looking at using, we don't have, that's beyond our resources. So we need to look at that a little bit deeper.
[Schulman]: I think I covered everything I didn't mention about care solace is there's an another layer of protection there and just like the worst case scenario if somebody calls and they're making threats towards somebody in the community, our schools, they have. a emergency plan, so who to contact for when. And of course, they're calling the police station first, right? That's the number one call. But after that, they're calling our superintendent, myself, our SRO directly to say, FYI, this happened. We have referred it immediately to the police department, but you should be aware of this call. And likewise, if someone calls and says their life is in imminent danger, the same process occurs. Penny, I'm glad you were impressed with them. I mean, they're certainly, they're meant for a school service, but I have no doubt this is going to be an agency that grows significantly. They have found a niche that is certainly needed for people everywhere.
[bq-gVu-g8qk_SPEAKER_26]: There isn't a day that goes by that I don't hear from care solace and from William James. Sorry, I actually have doctoral students working here. So obviously I get a few more from William James but. Every day, every day, all day, my phone goes off, because we get referrals through those networks. And in fact, I think I reached out to you, Stacey, when I heard from Care Solace. I was like, why is that happening? But now I get it. And like I said, we're going to be able to provide more. And then by the end of May, we'll have two new clinicians in place.
[Schulman]: That's great news.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Any other questions?
[SPEAKER_13]: Okay. Thank you, Stacey. Penny, do you want to talk about the subcommittee reports?
[Funaiole]: Yeah, thank you everybody for attending these subcommittees. It was great because we had two separate conversations on the same day and we really kind of broke down. So I'll start with the plan and program group. What we discussed, So what we wanted to do. Was to really do this and do it annually. So we get it, we get a baseline this year and then we do a check-in is the program change. Have you added new programs? What does that look like? One of the other things is that we wanted to have. A one pager that can visually show what we have to offer. really make something very simple in simple language so it's not overwhelming to the public. We were looking at our departments that do forward-facing work within the community and really trying to figure out what is the effort here because I want to also say that we were You know, we added promote as in a very intentionally into this commission so that we weren't just talking about those who are in crisis or need we really want to get way ahead. And so we want to categorize those as well. And that's, you know, education curriculums different you know SEL, maybe, or, you know, maybe there's different promotion stuff that the YMCA is doing or the rec department's doing right. So what we, I actually, we walked away and I said I'll make a form and then I'm like, I can't figure out how to do this. Because what I'm concerned about is some, you know, if we go to the middle schools, they probably got 10 to 15 programs they're running so we want to make it brief for them and make it easy to enter in that information so I just created a template. Is is a matter of, you know, very simple information how many people are being served what's the program type. And then this would be the program types down here to refer to, and then we should. I actually missed a category, and that is, would you categorize this as promote, prevent, or support? So I'd like to add that piece. So that's the basic set, and the next thing is we need to roll it out. So I don't know if we vote on this form here, or we have some discussion on this form, and then from there, it triggers us moving forward to start gathering data. Does, what does everybody, let's first make comments on what we've got. for a tool, and then we can go from there.
[SPEAKER_08]: Penny, may I ask a clarifying question here? Go ahead. Just with the form, I think that's a good way to collect data. So are we going to be disseminating the form to people, to like programs in the community, or is one person kind of interviewing people to collect this information, like how are we collecting this information?
[Funaiole]: So I, that's a great question. I think it could go either way. You know, I mean, I would say that if it's easier for, you know, Stacey to just sit with an intern from my office and rattle off all the programs and they just check boxes and take notes, and then we kind of type it up and then she would use for approval, that would really help. I don't know if that would be helpful to you, but that's one option. It might make sense for, you know, another group that's maybe a lower list to just put in some simple piece it just do it themselves, you know, because it's only a couple programs. But that's the, but I would be happy to figure out resources to do the interview piece if that makes sense to people.
[Schulman]: I think from this, the school is going to be the largest lift here in terms of probably responding and figuring out all our programs. It's not only my department, it falls in under other departments as well. So probably a form or a walkthrough in terms of exactly what you want us to put down there would be helpful. And that way we could just respond to the information. Unfortunately, it's also one of the busiest times of year for us in June, wrapping everything up.
[Funaiole]: Is it possible to have, you know, kind of plan it out, but to have a meeting with administrators during the summer?
[Schulman]: In a perfect world, yes, but everyone kind of scatters and takes their vacations at different times. So it's not, we have dedicated times we need to be here, but we're in meeting, full meetings. I can do, I mean, again, we'll do our best. Just, we can figure out who needs to be captured and when.
[Funaiole]: Gotcha, okay. Okay.
[SPEAKER_13]: One thing I would suggest with the form. It is as much as you can make it a drop down kind of click type of thing, you know, because it gets very long, you know, doing a lot of typing and if we're just, you know, trying to gather categories and then if we're not capturing what we want we can always expand it from there but I find it a lot easier if someone says, is it this or that, you know, pick a category, boom, boom, boom. I'll do that. But if I've always typed in forms, and I can relate to Stacy, when you have a lot to do, I see stop somewhere at some point. And all that does is causes a backlog.
[Funaiole]: So I mean, so I that's what I struggled with was the idea that like, I can do a form. you know that has the same content repeated throughout but the my issue is is when you have more than three or four programs you're going to have to log out of the form and go back in or like however that works that's why I was thinking of a google doc as an easy like people can just like share that doc and start entering data so I'm happy to create a form I just will say that it It needs to be clear that it's not limited, you got to keep going back in and entering and more.
[SPEAKER_13]: So I was going to say, it depends on what program you use it. You know, so I don't know if you just.
[Funaiole]: What do you mean?
[SPEAKER_13]: Well, I use Qualtrics and other programs that just, you know, go next and you get another form up next and another form comes up, you just kind of roll through these things.
[Funaiole]: So are you volunteering to figure out? Okay, I don't know what that is. I would love to do that. I would love something cool like that. So maybe you can help me look at that and figure it out. I can. Yes, I would.
[SPEAKER_13]: I would suggest this because we don't have to vote on the form. We're not going to do that. But what we can do is kind of look at what we need to create this form. And then we can always vote about if we are going to purchase something or do something that makes it easy. Because I mean, I just know this. Like I always say, that's why they create graduate students in college. So you see a stack of papers and sit there all day and enter this data. You know, I don't do that. And so I mean, yeah, they make it because everyone's busy and all that and that's what happens I don't think it's not that anyone wants to collect the information, it just becomes very tedious to sit there, and the quicker you can make it, you know, the better and the more it's part of their system the better so. We can take a look at that and see.
[Funaiole]: Yeah, I mean, and another option, too, is sometimes in our office, we do we do like a working meeting where everybody shows up and that's their carved out time to work on that. And just are all kind of like on the side entering in information, doing adding to documents and stuff like that. That's another option. It's kind of like a like a like a data party or something like that.
[SPEAKER_13]: I would suggest this, without us getting into those weeds right now, if we could look at the form right now and see if there's anything else that people would like collected without going too far or just send it back to the committee to figure that out. Is there one or is there something that people want to collect it in the form? Something that.
[SPEAKER_08]: And could you share your screen again so we can get the form again? I don't know if this is too far off base, but as you know, as we have kind of established this commission to kind of identify the gaps and what we can do to meet those gaps. I wonder if it makes sense to ask the programs that are currently in place if they see any gaps in practice or the populations they serve or resources or whatever that can be collected so that we can kind of get a picture of what are the people who are working in the field noticing that's missing.
[Unidentified]: Right. Okay.
[Funaiole]: Any other thoughts.
[SPEAKER_13]: So when I thought what I think you thought about this. It's easy to gather data. That's not very hard. But gathering useful data becomes difficult. It's a more thing to think about. What are we trying to capture? How are we going to report this back? And how does that help us move forward? Because when I used to work for the state and all that, there was a bunch of forms to fill out all the time, a bunch of paper you fill out. And I had no idea why we were. It's just always a requirement. just kind of fill these things out, throw it into the black hole and move on again. And, you know, that wasn't a motivator to always fill these things out. And so I think, you know, if we're going to collect data, you know, really making it clear to people why we're gathering it, what we're going to use it for, and how it's going to help them. And as easy as possible to collect it.
[Funaiole]: Um, so I think what I can do is we're going to schedule some committees anyway. So, I will between now and that subcommittee, I will work on a form. I'll look at the different programs that I have access to and then if I hit a wall, I'll reach out for help. We can vet it, review it at the subcommittee and then send it out or set up as Stacey pointed out, maybe set up like a briefing for anyone who would be utilizing it to explain it, why we're doing it, what it is, what the expectation is, then ask them to complete it and we'll figure out a date, a deadline date. I mean, I don't know if it makes sense to give two months or to give a short deadline to people to just get it done. That's up to you all. But that's an idea. And then in that same vein, really, the data subcommittee, it's a similar thing. We wrote up all the different data points that we want to get. And now it's a matter of just getting the data uploaded and housed somewhere at least to start. So yeah, I don't know if I'm proposing a process or if somebody wants to refine that proposal. Does everybody feel like that's a good process is to just come up with a form to review at the next subcommittee meeting and then move on from there?
[Unidentified]: Yeah.
[Funaiole]: Okay. Does that require a vote? No. Okay. And then, so let me move on to the data so I can, we can keep this meeting going. So the data subcommittee was looking at by department, what are some key information that we're looking to pull, call, whatever you want to call it. You know, the police department has a lot of data that they can pull and they have an expert over there that can do that work. There were some different things that we were looking at for the schools. the Council on Aging, the fire department, we had some discussion of like, how can we create some systems of data collection? And then EMS had some specific data they could provide. I did reach out to DCF about this. I met with them, I actually had an interview with them for another data collection process I'm doing. It was really very interesting, what could be pulled back and put into this meeting, some of the results of it. but I didn't get any hard data from them. So I have qualitative data. I don't have quantitative data from the DCF. Anywhere where private practices can provide us information. I mean, I think that that's going to be like coordinating that will be hard to get a comprehensive sense of what that looks like, but it's definitely worth the effort. And then Mystic Valley Elder Services reaching out to them and asking them for some information as well. So that's what the data points that we were looking at were.
[Unidentified]: And yeah.
[SPEAKER_13]: The only comment I have, those data points looks fine. I just, and you probably thought about this when you gather your data. that they're non identifiable you know keeping confidentiality so because I'm not sure how these data sets look and what they're going to give you, but you definitely don't want names and. Other things that people can be identified with.
[Funaiole]: So yeah, absolutely not. It's just aggregate data. And then the qualitative data that I am collecting, we are going through a process at a regional level, and that will be redacted as if you made these comments. But all of the information from that will be funneled back to the commission for more detailed information. And I like to call it the boat, the boat. Why? We have the hard data says this is an issue and then we get our qualitative and it says, but why here? Why is this happening?
[SPEAKER_13]: I'm just waiting for it because I'm not sure, looking at the two chiefs or anyone else knows, I mean, what becomes public information once we get our hands on it? There's one thing, and I'll just pick on you, Chief Buckley, for a second. There's one thing that you have in your data in your hands, but as soon as you give it to us, I don't know what becomes public information under those guidelines.
[Jack Buckley]: So any of the information that is Statutorial guidelines as to what is public information and what is not that we buy but technically if we have it and we, in some form, doesn't matter if I give it to you or disseminate to anyone else. it's generally for what we have for data. If we create a document, if we type an email, if we do research and create data that is not to say didn't exist, but we create a new report, and then we disseminate that report, it becomes a public document. There are exceptions like you know and quite frankly, there's certain things I can't put in this this report anyway, right, and that might be restrictive, but it's going to be a real fine line but. I think there's, I'm going to have to do some research, but I think there's an exception that we can create that allows us to accomplish our goals and our mission for behavioral health and the sharing of that information, even if we redact certain information, but keep the statistical analysis of it. So.
[Funaiole]: Yeah. And I think that's largely what we're talking about here is right. What's the frequency of these particular data points. is what we should be looking at for this data collection. And then anything else that there should, I don't want any information that's identifiable of another person. Personally, I wouldn't want that. So I would assume that's what we're doing here.
[Schulman]: Similar for the school realm, anything that is not public data cannot be shared. But we can, a lot of this we report back to the Department of Education, which is public data for numbers. And that's certainly appropriate for us to look at.
[Funaiole]: So I had also on here the community care surveys as a point to talk about. If we had time, I would do a presentation of our 2019 data to see what this survey is. So yeah, like I can. I can certainly do that presentation at the next commission meeting, or I can send it to you, but it would be about 20 minutes so I'm going to hold off on doing that. What I will tell you is this we completed the communities that care survey data, we always have done it from 2005 until 2019 in February. And we have just incredible longitudinal data on youth substance use on youth. You know, depression on all kinds of community factors. Right, 2021, we did not be, we were not able to conduct the survey in the time frame that we did. So we worked with the schools and we recalibrated how we're going to start doing the survey. One, we went from paper, copy, Scantron, we moved it to an online tool. Two, we decided that we were going to do this survey in the, in the winter, like prior to the winter break, the December winter break. So that's what we did, we were able to collect the vast majority of the data happened in December of 2021. What happened at that point in time, though, is that we realized that the survey was not translated into multiple languages and that we were not truly capturing the entire population of the school, the 6th through 12th graders. Due to the fact that the 6th through 8th graders had already attempted the survey in a language that maybe wasn't their primary language, which was English, we were not able to resurvey the middle school students. We took the EL students, level one and two, and we provided them in their language the survey. It was in a paper copy form. It was the only real way to administer it. We had it translated into four languages, Haitian, Creole, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. I then had a second vendor, translating vendor review the first vendors work. So I, we did some due diligence there to make sure because this is about behavior, it's not straight translations. There were some nuances within that. So, that data has been collected. We have entered it, and we have provided it to the statistician, Bert Rothenbach, who's been working with us since 2005. I am not sure when and where he will get us the starting of the raw data, but what we need to do as a community We need to look at the questions and see what cross that. So what question do we want to put with this question? I can give you an example really quickly to show you what I mean. So we have here data that we analyze. We asked students in 2019, do you use marijuana? And what we found was my God was the present. So what we found was that Right, hold on, I'm in the mess. Sorry, so of the students who said they used marijuana in the past 30 days, we asked them, we looked at how did you use it? And what we found was, you know, this is the percentage who smoked it, this is the percentage who vaped it, this is the percentage who ate it. And again, these numbers are not, like these middle school students, So 6, 7, 8, these are really low numbers, right? So that 60% is that 60% of, you know, the sixth through eighth graders in that timeframe, it's not, it's only this group here. So these are low numbers of young people using it, but this is how they used it. So vaping it, eating it, those are very, you know, those are on the incline in terms of how to utilize the substance. So that's the kind of thing that we can do. We can break it down in multiple ways. But we also need to communicate with the statistician that's how we want to do it. So that's upcoming. And that, I think, will be a request for a team to sit and to really go through and analyze how else we want to see this data. And the vendor is going to give us a visual format. And they're also going to give us the full report, which we get every year so that you can go through it and you can look at some of the deeper dive questions more than just what we're highlighting. So that's that's the Community Care Survey update.
[Unidentified]: Any questions?
[SPEAKER_13]: OK, Penny, you got your Office of Prevention Outreach updates.
[Funaiole]: Yeah, so everybody, I want to introduce you to Jeff Gibson. He is our new recovery coach. So if you don't mind, Jeff, giving everybody an introduction to yourself, we're really excited to have him in the audience.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. First, let me apologize for being late. I'm kind of like all over the place today. My apologies. But my name is Jeff Gibson and I am the new Medford recovery coach. And I am hoping that I can be of help, you know, to anyone in need.
[Unidentified]: Thank you. Thank you, Jeff.
[Funaiole]: And Jeff, do you mind just giving a little bit of your background in the recovery field?
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes, sure. So I am also a general director for America Sober. And what America Sober is, is a group of sober houses. We have a house in the Cape area and then three other houses in the Boston area. And then also, I have also done planning of outreach, you know, I did a couple of years for the city of Chelsea, and it was great experience. You know, also did the Recovery Coach Academy and other trainings. That's basically it.
[Funaiole]: Yes, thank you Jeff and so yeah, Jeff has experience and out like outreach through Bay Co experience is working with individuals and they're sort of trying to get them stable to the next level. So it really well rounded very excited to have them. And I know Alicia needed the relief with all the other responsibilities that she works on. So I appreciate you coming on and introducing yourself. And if anybody wants to get together with Jeff, please feel free to reach out. I'm sure he'd be happy to meet with you, answer any questions. I have a few other announcements, if it's okay to keep going. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_13]: Let me ask you this penny this the kind of, are we just kind of moving to the announcement phase where this kind of roll that into the okay. So any other questions about the prevention outreach updates. No. Okay, so we'll move on to announcements.
[Funaiole]: So I would just like to let everyone know that I do have funding to send yourself, a staff member that works under you, to trainings. There's the Youth at Risk Conference that's coming up in a couple of weeks. That's up in Essex County. My first job as an intern was to help coordinate that conference, so a little full circle here. I'm hoping they'll one day change the name of that conference. But that is available to anyone that would be interested to go to that. There's also the New England School of Addiction Studies. We've sent police officers in the past. We send our staff and we send a lot of the recovery coaching staff throughout the region of the Mississippi Valley Public Health Coalition. So that's absolutely available. If you have somebody that wants to take one day of courses or the entire week, please let us know. I will be sending out an email announcing that. Another announcement I have is that you've all probably are like being bombarded by these offers, but we have more to offer. We have partnered with SAMHSA, the GAINS Center Policy and Research Associates for our court community, our court and justice involved community. for trauma-informed response for criminal justice professionals. You know, really trying to get people to be using a trauma-informed approach to all that we're doing. And Marion Ryan, DA Marion Ryan will be opening up that particular training. So that's coming up. And then I also in June will be doing for court professionals and criminal justice professionals, Harm Reduction 101 with Healthy Streets from Health Innovations. This is Mary Wheeler. Mary Wheeler has for the last eight years, nine years, been supporting our region and understanding how to address you know, opioid use harm reduction. She did some of the first trainings around Narcan in our community that that began. So she's an excellent, excellent professional, really has great insight. And she's been really doing doing the hard work in the community supporting people for where they are meeting them where they're at. So that's my announcements for things that are coming up. And I think that's it.
[Osborne]: Thanks, I have a question. You mentioned you have funding, how would a commissioner access your funding for training is only limited to courses you identify what if someone identifies other training.
[Funaiole]: So other trainings that I can pay for are anything related to health or racial equity. So, you know, I probably could on a case by case basis, let me know what you're looking for. And I can, I can ask, I have to get approved by the state, if it's, you know, some of the ones that I have mentioned are already approved by the state. So anything other than that, I just need to check in with them. But yeah, and actually, I'd like to Also, say we're working with our diversity equity inclusion director to do a really incredible presentation on bias for our department heads across the city all departments in the city will be invited to that, and the trainer is. Christian Bijou, and he is absolutely top-notch national level, excellent trainer. So I'm really excited about that. That will happen before the end of the fiscal year. So keep an eye out on that for the department heads.
[Osborne]: One process question. People would pay their own money and get reimbursed, or you would pay directly?
[Funaiole]: I can do either one. So I have, thank God, For Louise Ayala, who saves me every week with my financial stuff, I have the ability to either say pay by check and then give us the registration. We'll work with the vendor, pay them. If you pay yourself, we will work with you to be reimbursed.
[SPEAKER_13]: But knowing that the approval first of anything that's outside of those ones that I'm sorry, but yeah, but maybe that's something we do down the road is create a form, they can put it into a cost reimbursement. If we need to, but get all those approvals.
[Funaiole]: Yeah, I do have a form for you to register for the Youth at Risk Conference and for the New England School of Addiction Studies. So I will be sending that out. That's a form for us to know that you're interested, and then we'll work with you on the registration. But otherwise, yeah, I mean, we, I can, I will help, we will work it out. I will help pay for it.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, yeah, I think answering the other, we can make a form that maybe you can put in saying I'm requesting funds for XYZ. and where it'd be costing as quickly as we can. Because like Penny says, a lot of times it's not our money, it's the state's money, the feds money, and somebody else's money that we need to approve because I don't think there is any city funds or anything that we have our hands on. But yeah, if we can put together that process, that'd be great because then we meet the needs of the commission. I think that may be the same thing as we talked about somewhere down the road about programming that we do. Hey, it'd be great to have this program that we're not always at the mercy of the state or the feds. you know, to meet our needs.
[Unidentified]: Okay. Any other announcements? If we don't, we're at the end.
[SPEAKER_13]: Penny, you want to just talk about the next meeting?
[Funaiole]: Yes. So the next meeting would be slated for June 29th at 1 p.m. That was a, we had come up with that date because we felt that it was prior to the holiday that would give the entire summer. It would give us a couple of months to not worry about meeting prior to the summer and the holiday, the 4th of July. So that would be the next meeting and yeah.
[SPEAKER_13]: That's a zoomie.
[Funaiole]: Yeah. Okay.
[SPEAKER_13]: Okay, if there's nothing else I need to someone emotion to adjourn.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Motion to adjourn Maria.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes, okay.
[Paulette Van der Kloot]: Second.
[SPEAKER_13]: Okay. No, a discussion. Now let's go straight to a vote.
[Funaiole]: Hi, Chief Buckley. Chief Freedman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: I'll be funny. Yes. Neil Osborne.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Kelly. Yes. Stacy Shulman. Yes. Richard Raymond.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Ian Wong.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Funaiole]: Maria Dorsey. Yes. Anshika Hansen-Verma. Yes. I'm Patricia Brady. Yes. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everyone.