43
trumbull county children services Board seeks approval of new position
Photo
Kerosky
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The Trumbull County Children Services Board, at today’s board meeting, will be asked to approve the appointment of Becky Peters to a new position of visitation coordinator.
Peters, a caseworker, will receive a 3 percent increase in pay to take on the new job, according to the meeting agenda, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. at the board’s offices, 2282 Reeves Road. She now earns $43,371 annually. Creation of the new position is among the improvements the agency’s executive director, Nick Kerosky, plans to discuss.
Kerosky also will mention that the agency is reviewing all of its child-custody cases in which children receive family visits, especially cases involving sex offenders, according to the agenda.
The agency has reviewed its visitation policy in recent months after the Warren Police Department revealed it arrested Cody and Felicia Beemer of Warren in late September. They are accused of raping their 9-month-old daughter during a visit at Children Services offices. The Beemers allegedly videotaped the acts on a cellphone, police said.
The victim’s biological grandmother has alleged that Cody Beemer, 23, was a juvenile sex offender and that the agency was aware of that information when it allowed he and his wife to have an unsupervised two-hour visit with the child in April.
Trumbull CSB on Friday released a copy of the revised visitation policy it has submitted to Ohio Job and Family Services.
Ohio JFS asked the agency to submit an action plan to address deficiencies JFS found when it looked into visitation at the agency.
Kerosky will highlight some of the changes Children Services is proposing in the new policy, such as a ban of cellphones and other devices capable of taking photographs or producing videos, the agenda says.
Another change is that all visitations at the agency are being recorded, Kerosky said. In April, some visitation rooms had video cameras but not all, officials have said.
Trumbull Children Services also is conducting a survey of the visitation policies in other counties of comparable size, Kerosky said.
Another change being planned is to move an outdoor playground to a different area that can be better monitored and videotaped.
Employees involved in visitations will also receive additional sexual-abuse training.
The agency’s new visitation policy is five pages long — about 11/2 pages longer than the previous one, which was approved in May 2007.
The new policy still allows for a range of types of supervision of visitations — including the presence of a Children Services employee the whole time, random checks of the monitoring equipment and random trips into the room, and camera monitoring only.
The agency also allows visitations to occur outside of the agency offices or in the home of a parent, guardian or custodian.
Unsupervised daylong, overnight and weekend visits are completed as part of the planning for a child’s return home, the policy says.
A variety of quality- assurance procedures are being proposed under the new policy, such as random-sample reviews by supervisors of employee compliance with procedures, Kerosky has said.