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14 they were improving. When we asked whether, in their judgement, mental health services in Lexington are better or worse now than they were a few years ago, 54 percent thought they had gotten worse, 21 percent thought they were as good now as they were earlier, and 14 percent thought they had improved. 5. INTERPRETATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS Lexington is blessed with a large, highly trained, and experienced corps of mental health service providers. There is of course no restriction on access to services anywhere in the region so Lexington residents may and often do seek help from providers located outside of the community, while many non-residents are clients of providers whose offices are based in Lexington. No one can measure the in- and out-movement demographics, but we know they are substantial. Lexington also hosts four agencies with highly trained, experienced service staffs. Sizeable as they are, two of these - Eliot and Edinburg - serve very few Lexington residents. Together, they diagnosed or treated a total of 117 Lexington residents during fiscal year 2002. The Lexington High School Guidance Department devotes all but a fifth of its professional energies to college and job placement and related academic advising and paperwork. It is also gravely restricted in the range and depth of counseling and mental health assistance work its staff is permitted to do under school committee policies. RePlace is the one agency which contracts with the Town of Lexington to serve youth. The amount of the contract is less than half of the funding made available annually to the Town of Bedford Department of Family and Youth Services. Bedford has a substantially smaller resident population - 12,361 in the 2000 Census - than Lexington. RePlace currently does a lot with the resources it has to work with, but its parent agency Wayside went into the red in fiscal 2002 and may prove unable to supplement the funding of Lexington’s program in fiscal 2003.