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24 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. Our evidence suggests that RePlace is well regarded by professionals in Lexington, but that it is utilized as a referral resource by Clarke Middle School primarily, as well as by some physicians and counselors, but not by Lexington High School or Diamond Middle School. Solo practitioners, mental health practitioners within the agencies, and others we contacted in the course of this project concur generally that Lexington, with all of its abundance of helping talent, displays a serious lack of services for adolescents. There is also a lack of collaborative coordination between the solo practitioners and between professionals within Lexington High School and these practitioners.. This has been a study of mental health service providers and their knowledge and