EATON — Preble County Job and Family Services Director Becky Sorrell and Administrative Assistant Erin Harris presented county commissioners the agency’s monthly update on Wednesday, June 21.
Preble County’s unemployment rate was 2.9 percent in May, according to Harris, who noted there are 700 people in Preble County on unemployment.
“These are the lowest unemployment rates, I think I’ve ever seen since I’ve been tracking. Other than that, our numbers are staying pretty steady. Food stamp recipients I think are lower than they have been in past years but staying about an average amount each month this year,” Sorrell said.
There has also been a slight increase in the number of visitors to the Job Center, according to Sorrell.
Harris pointed out some individuals will be losing childcare payment assistance on July 1.
“For quite some time, there’s been a waiver at the state level where they were covering all payments for people on publicly funded childcare and that is coming to an end July 1,” she said. “So people will be responsible for their co-payments.”
Sorrell said on the Children Services side, there was a large number of referrals in May.
“I think part of that’s coming to the end of the school year,” Harris said.
“The end of the school year always creates a lot of ‘suddenly we need to make sure’ referrals from school personnel, when they no longer have eyes on a kid for the summer and they get concerned and we get a whole lot of referrals — which is not great, since we don’t have a whole lot of staff to scramble around,” Sorrell added.
“I do have to say again that Madison County has been covering our after hours phone for us. They covered again for June. They’re looking at a schedule for July. And that has literally been a lifesaver for our staff. They’ve done excellent work. They immediately get everything documented, get any assessments done and I couldn’t say enough positive things for the help they’ve provided for our county.”
In addition ongoing cases, Preble County’s two caseworkers and one supervisor were currently working on 44 open intake cases, on top of their ongoing cases, and according to Sorrell are “completely overwhelmed.”
“I don’t typically list open intake cases because they change so rapidly,” Sorrell said. “But I just looked at the report yesterday and for me there were 44 open intake cases which are split between those three girls, along with two of them carrying all of these ongoing case cases other than the permanent custody which has a different worker.”
Sorrell discussed staffing, including an intern who will be joining JFS in the fall.
PCJFS is looking at a fellowship program to help generate some interest in workers for the agency.
With this partnership, with Wood County, “They’ll do all the recruitment of college students who want to work in children’s services. They’ll be offered a part time position with the county through a special grant they got through WIOA, which will pay them $15 an hour. They’ll go through their core training. And so it’ll be very similar to what we’re doing with the ones that we’ve hired, but differently we won’t have to pay them,” Sorrell said.
“We are finalizing some details to get a billboard put up that says that we are hiring Children Services caseworkers specifically, so hoping that’ll generate some interest,” she added.
Harris also reported on changes in requirements for SNAP food stamp recipients, employment training programs and others, including the possibility that EBT cards used for food stamps have a photo on them.
“Some good news,” Harris said. “We had our childcare monitoring visits on May 11. Every year the state comes in and monitor all of our files, how we deal with the system. All of that was good. And then they also go out with our worker to do an inspection of our one home childcare provider that we have, and everything went really well. The only thing that was missed was that our worker missed a couple of the forms were outdated forms. That was literally all that was missed. So, I’m pretty happy about that because it’s very difficult for us to remember all those rules when we only have one provider and we’re only going out twice a year — one of those times being with a state person which can be intimidating. So I was pretty pleased with that.”
Harris continued, “I was pretty pleased with our implement incentive program. I had talked to you guys about that a few months ago. That is the program that we are offering the incentive payments to individuals who are on food assistance who obtain employment and are no longer eligible for food to help with that benefit. We have helped 29 people and paid out $13,000.”
Sorrell also introduced a change in public office hours at JFS, with all agencies in the building being open from 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
Reach Eddie Mowen Jr. at 937-683-4061 and follow on Twitter @emowenjr.
