Meeting of March 28, 2023

welcome to the March the 28th 2023 meeting of Hardin County Fiscal Court I remind you this is a working meeting so if you have cell phones please turn them off or put them in the silent mode clerkley please call the roll Squire Clem here Squire Hicks here Esquire Muse here Squire Pennington here Squire Saltzman here Squire Thompson here Squire Whitehead here Squire Yates here judge tall our invocation will be given by Master adichie Thompson and the pledge will be led by Kenny Salzman please stand invite you to pray with me father God we just want to praise you right now for your blessings Lord we're so blessed in Hardin County that we often take it for granted forgive us Lord for taking anything for granted Lord we thank you for it your continued watch care over us we thank you for Jesus who allows us to have a relationship with you we pray father that you would Find Us Faithful in seeking to be about your way and your

work help us Lord to devote our mans and hearts to the business before us today and help us to make good and right decisions that will honor you and bless our community in Jesus name I pray amen amen do I mean the pledge for all foreign is not with us today unfortunately he is ill and on behalf of the Court we wish him a speedy recovery and return the next order of business will be the approval of the Fiscal Court meetings minutes of March the 14th 2023. do I have a motion motion by Mr Yates second and Jake second by Mr Pennington any discussion hearing none Clark Caldwell Square Clem yes Squire Hicks yes Squire Muse yes

Squire Pennington yes Squire Saltzman yes Squire Thompson yes Squire Whitehead yes Squire Yates yes with us today we have Michelle and kale representing the casa of the Heartland and Michelle will present information regarding Casa and the vital role that they play in regards to abuse and neglected children Michelle I'm very glad to have you today thank you very much for having me um so as Mr Fernand Casa is court-appointed special advocates for children and what we do is recruit train and support community volunteers who Advocate on behalf of abuse and neglected children who are under petition with the Hardin County family courts and we actually just got the approval to expand into Libre County as well so we will we will start serving children in Bill Cardin and Larue later this year the process for Casa when we go to court every Wednesday the family court judges judge Blair and judge Hall will assign Casa to the case and then we will give that case to a volunteer if we have a volunteer available to take that

case and then they will go out in the community and gather information for that child whether that's contacting teachers coordinating with dcbs Etc making sure that they can gather all the information that they can to present to our judges so that way they can make sound decisions with as much information as possible and that cycle continues we currently have four employees myself and then sorry myself and then we have four additional employees who mostly serve as Advocate coordinators and so each of those employees have up to 30 volunteers on their caseload and so what they do is oversee the volunteers advocacy as well as the cases that they serve on making sure that Court reports are submitted on time and with appropriate recommendations and so at any given moment they might have a caseload of 45 court cases you know kind of swimming around in their head that they have to oversee the financial impact of this advocacy every time we get a brand new volunteer it costs about 55 dollars just to get them ready to go or allow them to even be a potential Advocate because the

very first thing that we have to do is run background checks because all of our volunteers are heavily vetted I think I counted and we run about seven background checks on every single person who comes in whether they're a board member an advocate or a staff member and those background checks cost about 25 to run them all and then for training and materials um it's about a five-week course of 30 hours that it takes to train a volunteer to get them ready to serve on a case and then the training materials the the training manual that our volunteers need it's about thirty dollars worth of printing just to get all of that ready for them so that way they have all the tools necessary to be able to serve in this capacity and so advocacy for one month is about 195 dollars and for one whole year per child is about twenty three hundred dollars um and an interesting fact is that it actually takes less funds to provide advocacy via Casa for one child than it does for an entire year than it does one month of foster care for the state of Kentucky and so we currently have a wait list which those are cases that we've been appointed to and we do not have a

volunteer to serve on those cases um some of these cases go back as far as 2016 and unfortunately you know we haven't had volunteers who have been able to to serve on those cases some of them are as new as last week about a month ago this number was at around 96. we've been trying to you know give recommendations to the best of our abilities with our current Advocates get new Advocates sworn in we swore in a new group of Advocates on the first of March so we've already got them assigned to new cases um so we are working through this waiting list as quickly and as diligently as possible but it all boils down to we need more volunteers and so um one thing that I'm challenging everybody everywhere I go to think about April is Child Abuse Prevention month and so if everybody could just think of one person in their life that is passionate about children and might have 10 to 15 hours a month on their hands that they could serve as a casa you know I challenge you to tell them about Casa's Mission and just encourage them to fill out the application or give our office a call just to see what exactly

that entails so that way we can get those numbers down in 2022 we had 51 Advocates who were able to serve 126 children which equated to about 1250 hours worth of advocacy in Hardin County um and so one of the biggest questions that we get is what is our need and how can people support so like I said number one is getting me connected to others other organizations Etc so that way I can share the mission of Casa and try my best to get other people who are passionate about this cause who are willing to dedicate their time and serve as a volunteer the other way that people can support is by supporting our events fundraisers so this Friday March 31st we are going to be hosting pinwheels for prevention which is a national Child Abuse Prevention campaign and so we will be planting it is 644 pinwheels to represent every child that we have served since our Inception in 2007 and this is going to take place at the Elizabethtown Police Department

from 9 A.M to 1 30 p.m this Friday following our pinwheel planting we are doing a community event at Pritchard Community Center from 3 P.M to 7 p.m because these pinwheels are supposed to represent that every child is deserving of a hopeful healthy and happy childhood and so we want to be able to do something that offers a fun family experience so that way these children can have that hope health and happiness and so we will have Inflatables food trucks Raffles at Pritchard that evening and so we encourage everybody to come out and support if possible on May 9th we have Kentucky gives day so we will be doing a campaign for Kentucky kids day and we encourage people to donate if they have the means um budget allocations are always much appreciated and then on August 12th we will be hosting our annual Farm to Fork event at the Highland sod farms um so be on the lookout for more information regarding that but I wanted everybody to know so that way you can go and put that on your calendar because we love for our community leaders and our community members to come out and support because you know while we are a non-profit and we always need funds the biggest thing that we need is awareness and that's what we're really trying to