BCSD undecided on Northwell mental health partnership

By JEFF MORRIS

A district partnership with Northwell Health for its adolescent behavior health clinic, funding for which was approved by voters as part of the school budget in May, remains in limbo. 

The partnership came up for discussion at the Sept. 10 Board of Education meeting, after an update by Superintendent Robert Glass. 

Back in February, Glass introduced the idea, saying he and some board members had been in a meeting with representatives of Northern Westchester Hospital, where he is a member of the president’s council. NWH is part of Northwell Health. He said NWH had, a couple of years ago, started looking at what they could do to assist with the mental health crisis and improve their services. They made a proposal to all the schools in the area, he said, that they establish a clinic in Mount Kisco to serve as a kind of “urgent care for mental health.”

Glass had said there would be a cost to participate, but if you participated, a student in crisis, instead of being transported to the emergency room — which is not well equipped for mental health crises — would be transported to the clinic and have their needs met whether they have insurance or not. The student would be triaged, helped to navigate the system, and directed to long-term care if needed. 

Glass said participation would cost the district about $100,000 a year, but there would be BOCES aid that would bring it down to about $65,000. 

In March, Glass presented $65,000 in support for the Northwell Health Adolescent Mental Health Clinic as part of his “straw design” for the budget. There was considerable deliberation among board members about participation during the budget development process, and it ultimately was included in the budget that voters approved in May.

Glass now says that districts were offered the opportunity to participate with the knowledge they had at the time, which was “not all the detail.” He said upon looking at the agreement between Northwell and Northern Westchester/Putnam BOCES, through which services would be offered in order to qualify for state aid, the district asked some questions of legal representation regarding liability issues. 

Those questions were mostly answered in executive session, though some questions remained.

Glass said he asked additional risk assessment questions, and had been told that there was “very low risk,” but not no risk.

“The reason we’re discussing this today, is because I feel like we had said we’re going to put this in the budget, we’d like to do this,” he said. “We were intending to participate, but we were just sitting tight pending more information about the risk. We now have about all the information we’re going to get.”

There was no urgency to make a decision, Glass said, but he needed to get the feelings of the board before he signed anything.

Much of the discussion that followed repeated arguments that had been made, pro and con, during the earlier budget deliberations. Trustee Lisa Mitchell said she thought the issue had already been decided, and should not be relitigated. Trustee Steven Matlin said he did not agree to do it unconditionally, but with the understanding there would be additional information forthcoming. Board President Gilian Klein said she was concerned that legal counsel is now saying there is “low risk” rather than “no risk” of liability, and that another member of the legal team had expressed stronger concern about potential risk. The sticking point was that BOCES would not indemnify the district.

The possibility of issuing a disclaimer in a notification letter in conjunction with offering services, as was being done in the Chappaqua district, was talked about. Klein continued to stress that there was disagreement among legal counsel as to the level of risk if the district were not indemnified, and there was continuing disagreement among board members as to whether such a letter would really mean the district was not liable.

“I support anything we can do to support the mental health situation,” Matlin said. “Where I can’t get over the hump in this is, however low you want to quantify the risk as, we are now putting taxpayer dollars at risk for this program, that’s not a school-run program. That’s the hurdle I can’t get over.”

With the board unable to come to a consensus, a resolution to approve signing the agreement was removed from the agenda. Klein noted that before they ever considered the idea, their attorney had investigated the indemnity issue, and they had been through numerous steps before getting to this point. There will be further investigation of possible ways to mitigate risk.