LAWRENCE COUNTY Foster family raises likely

Commissioners are looking into microfilming county records.
By LAURE CIOFFI
VINDICATOR NEW CASTLE BUREAU
NEW CASTLE, Pa. -- Lawrence County commissioners are considering giving foster families a raise.
County commissioners say the increase is intended to attract more foster families directly to the county and cut out more costly private agencies that now find foster homes.
The county deals directly with some foster families, who are paid $12 a day for each child.
But most foster children in Lawrence County are placed into homes through private agencies, commissioners said.
The county pays these private agencies an average of $50 a day for each child. The agencies pass on about $18 per day to foster families and keep the rest, said Commissioner Roger DeCarbo.
Commissioners say raising the county foster family fee to $18 per day could cut out the private agencies and make more money available for direct foster care.
"If we can recruit more people, we won't have to go to these outside agencies and pay their overhead," Commissioner Brian Burick said.
DeCarbo said the county pays an estimated $2 million each year to about a dozen different agencies to find foster families. By comparison, they deal with only 20 foster families directly, he said.
He added that there are nearly 600 children now in foster care and an additional 100 on a waiting list for foster families.
Paper piles
In other business at their meeting Thursday, commissioners said they're looking into hiring a microfilming company to eliminate stacks of papers in county prothonotary and clerk of courts offices.
County records from 1920 to 1985 are already on microfilm, but a previous commission stopped the microfilming project before the rest of the records could be done, said Helen Morgan, the county's prothonotary and clerk of courts.
Her office now has stacks of boxes that contain the paper records from 1985 through 2000. Morgan said there are 1,330 boxes, each containing an average of 750 pages.
Commissioners are considering hiring an outside company to microfilm the older records. They say the cost is expected to be about $36,000 and it would take one year to complete.
Morgan noted that any money used for microfilming would come from fees her office charges and not from county tax dollars.