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Teen organizers in Springfield protested outside the city's school department office on Main Street this week. They believe mental health resources in the district are inadequate.
Springfield Honors Academy junior, Luna Lucia Lawton, said she struggled with anxiety for years and when she turned to her school's resources for help, she wasn’t shown much support.
"They were too busy, often like the demand for counselors was more than the amount of counselors that they had,” Lawton said. “They had outside services like BHN that they said would come into the school to help us and that never happened."
Azell Cavaan, a spokesperson for the Springfield Public Schools, said the district is spending more than $30 million dollars on mental health resources for the upcoming school year, referring to it as an unprecedented amount for the district.
“There is a wide array of mental health services available in every single school, ranging from a city coordinator in every building to a counselor in every building. Some schools have outside agencies that are located inside the building providing mental health services for students,” Cavaan said.
She called the group's allegations misleading.
"It's not something that we have turned a blind eye to or certainly not anything that we're unconcerned with," she said.
The teens submitted a public records request to the district asking for a breakdown of resources that the $30 million is being spent on specifically. The students said they received a 500-page response from the district that didn't contain the information they wanted.
“They view our opinions and feelings as something that they can shove into a bin and never look at or hear about again,” Lawton said as other student protesters crumbled pages of the report and threw it in a trash bin outside the Springfield school department office.
Cavaan said the district followed the law and the requirements of the public records request they were given.
Tara Parrish, the executive director of the Pioneer Valley Project, said they’re planning on appealing the district’s response.
“The appeal is going to be based on the lack of transparency around how that portion of the $30 million district wide where there's a claim that that's the amount being spent on mental health services and social emotional supports for students has been spent in the high schools,” Parrish said.
Student protestors like Lawton said they’ll continue to fight for the mental health needs of students in Springfield.
