CCAO Statehouse Report - July 8, 2022

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THE STATEHOUSE REPORT
July 1, 2022

A publication of the County Commissioners Association of Ohio
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Statewide eWarrant System Launched

Earlier this week, Governor Mike DeWine and Lt. Governor Jon Husted announced the official launch of Ohio’s new eWarrants system, a statewide criminal justice database that will improve the accuracy of state and federal background checks and streamline the process to file warrants and protection orders in Ohio. The new system is a result of the Governor’s Warrant Task Force, which discovered that an untold number of Ohio arrest warrants and protection orders were slow to be - or were never - entered into LEADS and NCIC due to the fragmented, inefficient, and technologically obsolete warrant entry practices in use by many courts and law enforcement agencies in Ohio.

The Meigs County Common Pleas Court, which was the first agency to bring the eWarrant system online, has reduced its bench warrant filing time to as little as 12 minutes, as opposed to the previous days-long process that involved the hand-to-hand transfer of paperwork between agencies and duplicative data entry into multiple case management systems. Use and installation of the interface is available at no charge to all law enforcement agencies and courts in the state and can be integrated to work with record management vendor systems that agencies already have in place. Use of eWarrants is not mandated, but the benefits to public safety and officer safety make this new interface an incredibly valuable tool.

If you have any questions regarding the eWarrant system, please contact Legislative Counsel Kyle Petty at 614-220-7977 or via email at kpetty@ccao.org.

ODJFS releases more information on caseworker recruitment and retention grants

This week the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services released details to Public Children Services Association directors about the $15 million grant program to help public children services agencies recruit and retain frontline caseworkers and supervisors.

The program will be administered through the Public Children Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO), which will host a webinar (date TBA) to provide an overview regarding the application process. A copy of the application will be provided in conjunction with the webinar.

The letter from ODJFS to children services directors, available here, outlines 11 permissible usages of the funds. Additionally, it states that agencies must participate in at least one of three statewide workforce initiatives as a condition to receive funding: exit surveys for children services staff upon leaving employment, utilizing AVEnueS Virtual Reality headsets as a pre-hire activity, or utilizing caseworker and supervisor onboarding curriculum developed by the Office of Families and Children. More details about these three initiatives are available in the letter.

ODJFS also released a table providing the allocation under the program available to each of the 85 public children services agencies in the state. The allocation was calculated using the same methodology as the State Children Protective Allocation.

Any questions concerning the program and the webinar/application should be directed to either workforce@pcsao.org or ODJFS Program Administrator Vince Ciola at vincent.ciola@jfs.ohio.gov.