Garden City, Kansas is home to the 25th Judicial District Youth Services. A juvenile probation provider, the 25th Judicial and its employees operate a community-based program to help youths adjudicated as juvenile offenders. They serve approximately 100 juvenile offenders at a time, as well as lead prevention services for those at risk of entering the juvenile justice system; serving 200 youth in fiscal year 2013 alone. The 25th Judicial District Youth Services has been using Corrections Online Training Collaborative (COTC) powered by Relias Learning for their staff training since June of 2013.
Challenges
Prior to the adoption of an online platform, the 25th Judicial District Youth Services relied heavily on traveling to meet training needs. “At least 25%-50% of our training involved some sort of travel,” says Jim Perkins, Director of Youth Services, “As where we are located in western Kansas that presented a problem for us fiscally.”
The 25th Judicial District is required to complete 40 hours of training per year to meet their education needs. Much of those hours required sending their staff to training for up to 2 ½ days— while having to pay for travel expenses such as lodging, gas, meals, etc. The expenses for staff members being sent to training was costing, “a big chunk of change,” according to Jim. “In previous years it was not unusual to send staff out of the area to various locations in the state for training needs. Considering the high cost of travel and lodging, we needed a local solution to training and looked for other avenues to provide these needs.”
Solution
To alleviate the costs associated with travel and outsourcing, the 25th Judicial District Youth Services began looking for a way to bring the training to them. “We started looking for online platforms to bring training to the staff,” explains Jim. That research led them to the COTC and Relias Learning.
Utilizing the COTC’s expansive library of course content, the 25th Judicial District was able to provide staff with more training internally—drastically reducing the need to outsource training. Not only did this improve their bottom line, but also gave them the opportunity to facilitate more of their own training.
“For any new hire staff, we can create and upload orientation materials on the Relias system, and put it out there for them to take,” says Jim. “This training is automatically documented, tracked, and forever in the system. It’s a much easier way, from an administrative viewpoint, to monitor and track training needs.”
“[We’ve been able to] virtually eliminate the need to travel for training except for that training deemed absolutely necessary to meet state standards.”
Results
The 25th Judicial District Youth Services has been able to, according to Jim, “virtually eliminate the need to travel for training except for that training deemed absolutely necessary to meet state standards.” Almost all of their 40 hours of required training can now be completed internally. This elimination of travel has helped the 25th Judicial District cut their training costs by 25%- 50%—while still being able to provide a wide variety of content to fulfill staff education requirements.
“We’re real pleased with the system. It’s been a big help for us and completely easy to work with.”
This elimination of travel has helped the 25th Judicial District cut their training costs by 25%-50%— while still being able to provide a wide variety of content to fulfill staff education requirements.
