The Hingham 'Cast

Residents are being asked whether or not we should override Prop 2 and half with a 7.9 million dollar override and permanently raise our property taxes so that we can maintain current services and fund different investments and needs. 

Without an override, we’d be about six million dollars short. We would have to cut services and lay off 19 municipal employees and 46 positions in our schools. Both the Select Board and the Advisory Committee were unanimous in voting in favor of passing the override. Why?

My guests are Select Board Chair Bill Ramsey, School Committee Chair Michelle Ayer  and George Danis, Chair of Hingham’s Advisory Committee.

I wish I didn't feel so woefully inadequate in finding words to describe where we are. Maybe there are no words. Maybe I have no idea.

What I do know is that people are in pain. People need help and we all need each other. 

In this week's episode I talk with three women trying to help our community. Susan Sarni, Hingham's executive health officer is helping lead an effort to deliver a kind of one-stop shop for health and wellness through town resources. It's a work in progress, and they want to hear from us on what we think could help our community, but they are amplifying services for mental health, physical and spiritual health and addiction. Heather Rodriguez, director of counseling for Hingham Public Schools shares what counselors are seeing with our students and what is currently and will soon be available to help them. 

Kathleen Bambrick is a social worker with Aspire Health Alliance. We talk about the importance of normalizing the conversation around mental health (whole person health!) and what resources they are offering to help local families immediately.

I hope you find value in the conversation and will lend your voice to the process. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please call the crisis lifeline at 988. You are not alone and people want to help you.

When Kenzie Blackwell heard some public school students were using socks, dish towels and cardboard to serve as pads during their period, she knew the work she had to do. The Hingham woman launched Free . (period), a non-profit that provides free tampons and pads in public schools and to local service providers like Father Bill's and Interfaith Social Services.

Kenzie and Ann Linehan, a Brockton Public School nurse and consultant for the state Department of Public Health sit down with Ally to share their story and their mission, which is not yet done.

If your child is threatening suicide, if someone in your family is abusing drugs, if you're struggling with a mental health crisis, Aileen Walsh can help. She's Hingham's new community crisis response clinician. She's embedded in the Hingham Police Department and brought to calls where a social worker might offer a different or added resource than a police officer.

She counseled terrified residents when a man barricaded himself in his apartment and fired at police officers in the Hingham Shipyard in 2020. She's gotten immediate help for teens threatening to hurt themselves or family members. She's kept drug abusers out of jail cells and gotten them into treatment just when it seemed all hope was lost. For families who don't want to call police for fear their crisis will end up in the police blotter, Walsh can help privately, without public records being kept.

#mentalhealth #suicideprevention #diversion #communitypolicing

Ally Donnelly  

Hi and welcome to the Hingham ‘Cast. I'm your host Ally Donnelly. This episode is brought to you by Derby Street Shops. 

The Hingham ‘Cast is hyper local, we look at the world through the lens of one small town. My town here on Boston’s, South Shore, but the issues we explore are unfolding in communities across the country. Like Back to School. It’s an exciting time of hope and promise, but for some kids it can also be a time riddled with anxiety.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 5 kids aged 6 to 17 experience a mental disorder in a given year. Some experts, including our guest today, say it may now be as high as one in four.  With an estimated $247 billion dollars spent each year to manage and treat those issues.

As we start another school year in a pandemic that just won't quit. I wanted to learn what we can do as families, as a community to meet kids where they’re at and help as best we can.

My guest today is Dr. Khadijah Booth Watkins. She's a child psychiatrist and Associate Director for the Clay Center for Young and Healthy minds at Mass General Hospital. She specializes in anxiety disorders, ADHD, and overall student mental health and suicide prevention. Dr. Booth Watkins, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Khadijah Booth Watkins/MGH Clay Center 

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk with you today about our kids and what's going on with them. 

Ally Donnelly 

Yeah, so much. Right? Give us a sense of the state of child mental health right now.

Dr. Khadijah Booth Watkins/MGH Clay Center 

Our kids are facing a mental health crisis, there has been alarms rang by the Academy of Pediatrics and of child and adolescent psychiatrists and children's hospitals. And then shortly thereafter, the Surgeon General also put out this morning saying that we're in the middle of a mental health crisis for our for our children and adolescents. They are really struggling with we're seeing an increase in depression and anxiety, suicidal thinking, loneliness. And the even scarier part is that much of this started well before the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Ally Donnelly  

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's data all over the place, right. But one, data point from the CDC said 44% of high school students said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness with girls and the LGBTQ plus community reporting the highest levels of poor mental health and suicide attempts. You know, as kids think about going back to school on top of what they've already experienced, you know, from the pandemic, from pre pandemic, think about bullying, peer pressure, school violence, fears, relationship building anxiety, you know, what's going on for kids as they think about heading back.

Dr. Khadijah Booth Watkins/MGH Clay Center  

So they are, they probably have a lot of thoughts going on. And many kids are excited to go back and they're looking forward to going back and then their kids who are dreading going back their kids who actually never liked school. So there are some kids who are more vulnerable. They they struggled with attending school for various reasons, whether it's learning issues, whether it's anxiety, whether it's social, social challenges, but they're worried about, you know, how they're going to perform, are they going to be accepted? Are people going to like them? Are they going to be able to make friends depending on whether your kid is going from a major transition from elementary to middle or middle to high school or even from high school to college, really just finding their place and and making sure that they feel secure and welcomed. They're worried about those things. And they're still many kids still worried about being healthy and staying...

A conversation on school safety with Hingham Public Schools Superintendent Gary Maestas.

There are three open seats for the Hingham School Committee. Four candidates are running: Aly Anderson, incumbent Nes Correnti, Matt Cosman and Matt LeBretton. If elected, they will help make up a volunteer body that has oversight of and responsibility for the school system, has the power to approve budgets, hire and fire the superintendent, negotiate salaries and set the direction for our schools. In partnership with the Hingham Anchor, hear where the candidates stand on spending priorities, teacher burnout, special education and out-of-district placements and working with incoming superintendent Margaret Adams.

A conversation with Dr. Margaret Adams, incoming Superintendent of Hingham Public Schools. Adams responds to the recent, explosive school committee meeting where interim Superintendent Dr. Gary Maestas said he would request "bodyguards and a bunker to be installed in my home," because of "the aggressive nature of some of our community members," around the issue of mask mandates in local schools. Adams, whose contract was approved shortly before the disturbing revelations said, "There's a lot of healing that needs to be done around the pandemic. We think the pandemic is over. It likely is not." Noting that the school committee had earlier voted to lift the mask ban in public schools, she went on, "As we drop this mandate, we likely will be wearing masks again at some point. However, we've grown so much. Let's build upon the resiliency, the perseverance of our young people, our educators, and build a stronger school and a stronger community."

We also talk with Dr. Adams about social-emotional health of students; diversity, equity and inclusion in our schools; the potential of a new arts director for Hingham and what causes her the most stress as she thinks about the challenges ahead. Have a listen!

On this episode, we talk with Hingham Meteorologist Michael Page about the Blizzard of 2022. Page shares why this storm was declared a blizzard, our snow totals and how they're measured, how the blizzard ranks in terms of other historic South Shore storms and the effects of climate on this and other storms. The local meteorologist also tells us what he thinks the rest of the winter will look like. We also check in with two Hingham High School students giving back to their community in bad weather. 

The Hingham Memorial Bell Tower is the only, freestanding tower of its kind in North America. Built in the early 1900s, it's a tribute to the ancestors of Hingham's first settlers from Hingham, England. There are 10 working bells in its belfry. The smallest bell is more than 500 pounds. The largest weighs about the same as a Honda Civic! Every Saturday, volunteers rise early to ring the bells for our community. They don't play songs in the traditional sense. This isn't chiming where a mallet or clapper hits the inside of the bell, this is a technique called change bell ringing. Ropes dangle down from the massive bells and the volunteers use their whole bodies to pull the bells upside down, through a full circle. The bells can't be turned fast enough to hit two notes in a row so the ringing is an ever-changing pattern of bell after bell after bell being rung. A joyful noise!