HomeMy WebLinkAbout2006-03-08-YSC-min Youth Services Council
Meeting Minutes - 3/8/06
Subcommittee Updates
Middle School Outreach Sub-committee
A half-day outreach initiative to Kimball Farm is scheduled for May 2nd, 2006 After
reviewing the school calendar, speaking with both middle school principals, and
getting the flyers made, we then found out that Diamond Middle School does not
have a half-day We plan to stick with the current plan and simply take more Clarke
students
Clinical Mental Health Sub-committee
The sub-committee has met with over thirty therapists from Lexington
Some of these therapists have attended every meeting but most have not As this
"Forum for Youth" group began to look at clinical mental health issues, trends, youth
needs, climate, and system's gaps we identified four target areas outreach and
education, clinical issues, consultation services and advocacy
These on-going monthly meetings have evolved to three more specific areas of
focus
• Consultation (once/week in middle and high schools for staff including
guidance counselors, social workers, special education staff)
• Speaker's Bureau
• Community Education (the Colonial Times has offered a page in every
issue that would include a listing of mental health resources, a regular
column, and anything else that we think should be included)
In turn, these discussions have led the sub-committee to questions about what is the
best structure for the YSC to promote a community-based collaborative effort (for
discussion of this item see next on agenda) The sub-committee and YSC spoke
about clinical issues such as how to assure confidentiality, how to assess competency
and appropriateness of volunteer consultants, speakers, etc YSC members felt that
having a contract that addressed these issues plus conflict of interest issues
would be helpful The sub-committee will continue to work on this
approach
Structure of YSC and Community Groups
The issues raised by the Clinical Mental Health Sub-committee led to a
discussion of the structure of the YSC and how we can best promote
community-wide efforts and find ways to connect people within the
community Bill Blout shared a structural diagram that the sub-committee had
created to begin discussion Under the umbrella of the Youth Services Council would
have three sub-committees Outreach/Prevention, Clinical Mental Health and
Advocacy/Community Action
YSC members then discussed this diagram and its implications There was
agreement that the YSC wants to encourage people in the community, who are
interested in developing and promoting youth services to collaborate with the YSC
One of the concerns is that small groups will be competing with each other and will
duplicate efforts Bill mentioned that a group of residents is coming
together to develop a proposal for teen services and wanted to go through
the YSC This led to discussion of having the Teen Center listed under the
Outreach/Prevention subcommittee Lauren suggested an alternative way to
portray the relationship and Bill agreed to revise the diagram We all
considered naming the subcommittees "task forces" to better indicate their
function When asked if we were ready to vote on the structure diagram,
we decided that Bill would do some more work on it and we would continue
to discuss it at our next meeting
We also agreed to invite the group who is interested in developing a plan
for teen services in Lexington to our next meeting
Drug Prevention Grant
Given the time, there was no time to discuss the Drug Prevention grant so
we will try to get to that at our next meeting as well
Next meeting April 5, 2006