McLean lawsuit decision expected early next year

By Alice C. Waugh

A ruling in the trial that took place after McLean Hospital sued over the town’s denial of a permit to house patients at a property in Lincoln is expected this winter or early spring.

McLean filed suit after the Zoning Board of Appeals ruled in November 2016 that a residential program in dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) for teenage boys did not qualify as an “educational” use of the residential property at 16 and 22 Bypass Rd. A property is exempt from many local zoning regulations if its proposed new use is religious or educational.

The trial ended on October 10. Post-trial briefs are due on December 1, and “we would expect the court to issue a ruling anywhere between 30 and 90 days thereafter,” said attorney Michael Fee. Fee is representing a collection of Bypass Road neighborhood property owners as defendants.

According to a pretrial memorandum, the defendants planned to call Elizabeth Simpson, MD, director of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, as an expert witness. “She will opine that [McLean’s Lincoln] program is substantively identical to standard DBT programs practiced throughout the country as therapeutic medical treatment reimbursable by insurance, and does not, in her opinion, constitute a program where the educational component is primary or predominant,” according to the memo.

McLean was scheduled to call three expert witnesses. Dr. Alex Miller, co-author of three textbooks on DBT, was expected to testify that DBT has “an educational focus as taught by qualified professionals who follow highly structured curricula with specific lesson plans and homework assignments,” according to the memo. S. Paul Reville, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and former Massachusetts Secretary of Education, planned to testify that DBT elements are already included in many schools’ IEPs (individualized education programs) for students with special needs, and that “secondary education is moving towards a greater focus on social and emotional growth and skills of the type on which DBT focuses.”