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Date: 7/20/2022
WESTFIELD – City officials said last week that they plan on transferring the position of coordinator for the Coalition for Outreach, Recovery and Education (CORE) from the umbrella of the Health Department to the mayor’s office.
CORE of Greater Westfield is a local drug task force that was created in 2016 to bring attention to the opioid problem in Westfield and work towards drug use prevention and recovery. It has operated under the Health Department since its inception, but Health Director Joseph Rouse and Mayor Michael McCabe said that transferring the role to the mayor’s office and refocusing the program’s efforts could help subdue the opioid epidemic.
“The mayor wants to take over the program in conjunction with the School Department,” Rouse told the Board of Health on July 13. “When school is in session, the program will be focused on prevention and reaching out to school kids.”
Rouse said by focusing the CORE team on prevention in younger students, they may be able to discourage future opioid use.
McCabe said that he wants to reshape CORE into a more robust program by combining several revenue streams that could be dedicated to opioid intervention and running programs like CORE out of that account. He said he spoke to Superintendent Stefan Czaporowski about getting drug-use intervention into earlier grades than currently in Westfield schools – as early as the elementary grades.
McCabe said the plan is still in the early stages and isn’t fully fleshed out, but that he wants to take the CORE coordinator position, formerly occupied by Kathi Cotugno, and turn it into multiple full-time positions with more funding.
Massachusetts is set to receive $526 million in two settlements from lawsuits against four U.S. drug makers who have been largely blamed for worsening the nationwide opioid crisis. Some of that money will be distributed to cities and towns across Massachusetts, including Westfield. In the first year, he said, Westfield is expected to receive $154,000.
That money, combined with a $500,000 grant for opioid intervention and some of the local tax revenue the city gets from its two cannabis dispensaries, could be used to fund prevention in schools and add more beds in local recovery centers.
“One theory we have is that we could use money from the opioid settlement to fund space for more beds in Westfield,” said McCabe. “The real failing in the opioid intervention system is that when people are ready for treatment, there often are not beds available.”