As poverty worsens, support programs face cuts
By Nick Claussen
Athens NEWS Associate Editor
May 8, 2008
Poverty in Athens County just keeps getting worse.
On Tuesday, Jack Frech, director of the Athens County Department of Job and Family Services (DJFS), said that because of state budget cuts and a rising demand for service, his agency is eliminating its contracts for funding several programs in the county that serve people living in poverty.
DJFS will keep funding for its main programs such as emergency assistance, food stamps, cash assistance and health-care programs, but it had to eliminate more than $851,000 in funding to other agencies in the county.
The funding cuts include $335,000 from Kids on Campus, $260,000 from Athens County Children Services (ACCS), $55,000 from Big Brothers/Big Sisters, $50,000 from the Appalachian People’s Action Coalition, $50,000 from the Hocking Athens Perry Community Action Program (HAPCAP) initiative that sends food home with children over the weekends, $35,000 from My Sister’s Place, $30,000 from United Seniors of Athens County, $25,000 from HAPCAP food-pantry programs, and $11,500 from the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine’s lice-prevention program.
Frech said that the cuts had to be made because of a combination of a loss of more than $400,000 in state funding and an increase in costs locally.
One big increase in local costs is the emergency funding program, which helps people when they need food, have received utility shut-off notices, and need money to pay the bills, or need money for gas or other items.
His office is projecting that it will spend $300,000 more on the emergency funding program this year over last year, Frech said.
“It’s a reflection of the economic times and the $3.75 a gallon gas prices,” Frech said. Many people don’t have enough money to pay for both gas and food, and they need the DJFS assistance to get by, he said.
The state cuts are a combination of reductions from different areas, along with changes in procedure for how counties can receive funding for meeting certain goals, Frech said. He is “absolutely” concerned about additional state funding cuts later in the year.
And while his agency has no choice, it’s difficult to have to reduce funding to the other local agencies, he added.
“Some of these folks we have had contracts with for over 20 years, and every single one of them is doing something that is important to people out there and to families,” Frech said. “This is adding insult to injury.” In some ways, this cut is worse than the $9 million cut in Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) funding the county DJFS office sustained in 2001. This is worse partly because of the economic conditions in the county and all of the programs that will be affected.
“This is absolutely the worst I have seen the human-service safety net out there since I began working in 1973,” Frech said.
The programs that are designed to help people in need do not even cover half of their expenses, and numerous programs that helped people in need have been cut in recent years.
“The living conditions for families out there are the worst that I have ever seen them,” Frech said.
THE FUNDING CUTS mean different things for agencies, and for Kids on Campus it means the Teens on Campus program will be eliminated, the number of children in the summer Kids on Campus program will be reduced, and the after-school program at Trimble Elementary School will be eliminated.
“It’s a major hit,” confirmed Leslie Moss, executive director of Kids on Campus at Ohio University. The agency has an overall budget of $1 million and serves 700 children and teenagers in its summer and after-school programs.
“We’re going to serve 100 less kids this summer,” Moss said. Typically, Kids on Campus serves 325 children in the summer, and this year it will only be able to serve 225.
“We had to totally eliminate our Teens on Campus program,” Moss said. The program brought students between the ages of 12-16 to campus five days a week in the summer for various programs. Many of the programs introduced the students to college life and encouraged them to consider attending college.
“There are no other programs that I know of in Athens that serve that age group,” Moss said.
Kids on Campus also eliminated 25 spots in its main summer program, Moss said. Nearly 75 percent of the children in Kids on Campus qualify for free or reduced lunches, and there’s a sliding fee scale for participants, Moss said. The program draws students from across the county.
The demand for the program always exceeds the space, and now there will be even less space for area children and teenagers, she said.
The DJFS money also funded an after-school program at Trimble Elementary School that served 60 children in grades 1-4.
“That’s going to be gone next year, which is a real loss for that community,” Moss said.
Kids on Campus has other funding sources for programs in other schools, and it will look for new sources of funding to try to replace the $335,000 it is losing from DJFS, Moss said. She added that Frech and Athens County DJFS have always been supportive of Kids on Campus, and said Frech told her he will help Kids on Campus if at all possible.
She wonders what will happen to the 75 teenagers who would have been in the Teens on Campus program, and said many of them come from families that don’t have many resources for other activities in the summer. “They’re just going to be stuck at home,” she said.
CHILDREN SERVICES WAS PREPARED for a possible cut, but hoped it would not be this severe, said Executive Director Andrea Reik. The funding helped pay for the Nelsonville Family Center, social workers in two local schools, and emergency funding for families who need money for gas or utility bills.
Reik hopes to use other funding to keep all of these programs going, but said the $260,000 cut will be difficult for her agency to absorb, with an overall budget of just under $7 million.
She is thankful for the support ACCS has received from DJFS, and like Frech worries about additional state funding cuts later in the year. Reik added that now is a terrible time for reductions in funding for programs that help people living in need, because poverty is getting worse in Athens County and around the state.
“My concern is families are under stress when you can’t meet basic needs… and now is the time we need to be there for families; we need to support them,” Reik said.
For Big Brothers/Big Sister of Athens County, the $55,000 cut amounts to losing 25 percent of the annual budget, according to interim director Jamey Bouwmeester.
The funding paid for one case manager who oversaw between 75 and 80 matches between “bigs and littles,” and also funded bimonthly activities for the children and adults in the program, he said.
Big Brothers/Big Sisters has 200 matches, with another 100 children on the waiting list for matches, Bouwmeester said. Despite the loss of funding, the agency will not cut any programs or services immediately.
“Right now, we have a little bit of money to keep going in reserve that we are going to tap into,” he said. Over the next few months, Big Brothers/Big Sisters will look for grant funding to replace the funding from DJFS, Bouwmeester added.
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