By: Lydia Crawley
The Parsons Advocate
Tucker County Commissioner Mike Rosenau commended Simmons for training that he had attended as Director of the 911 Center. The commendation came during the Commission’s August 9th meeting. “I want to commend you on all the training that you are doing,” Rosenau said. “This is not something that you bring to our attention too much because you’re doing it yourself, you think its part of your job.”
Rosenau also requested an update on what Simmons has been doing in regards to training. “As a Dispatch Center, we’re required to maintain certifications in a lot of different areas of discipline,” Simmons said. “Some are Fire related, some are EMS related, some are Law related, some are just general dispatching, bare necessities and responsibilities and we have not been compliant with those certifications for longer than I’ve been there.”
“Which is years,” Rosenau said.
Simmons said the county does not have a trainer and the costs for the courses were prohibitive. “We do not have an onsite trainer,” Simmons said. “The classes without a trainer are upwards of $3,000 a piece. You take that for 10, 15 employees, its very costly and that’s just for one class.”
However, Simmons informed the Commission that he has been taking the courses on his own. “So, I’ve been taking the classes myself and I also took the instructor course,” Simmons said. “So that when I finish with all the disciplines, I will be upgraded to be able to teach every class.”
According to Simmons, he is nearing completion of the requirements. “So, I have five of the six required classes complete,” Simmons said. “The last class I should finish next week and then we can start training employees.”
Simmons outlined how the training will be handled. “We made an adjustment to our schedule which allows for overlapping staff on Thursdays for a while and that will become our training day,” Simmons said. “So every Thursday, we can just go downstairs to the conference room there and I would anticipate probably about mid September, I can have all the employees certified in all the disciplines. Which, that’s never happened.”
“So, on behalf of the Commission, Michael,” Rosenau said. “I want to thank you for taking that on yourself…to do that, to save the taxpayers in our county thousands of dollars. Thousands. So job well done.”
The next meeting of the Tucker County Commission will be held on August 23rd at 6 p.m. at the Tucker County Courthouse Old Courtroom in Parsons.