Liberty County commissioners agreed to help the Liberty County Sheriff ’s Office provide some swag to local fifth-graders.
Commissioners voted to appropriate $5,000 from the DATE (Drug Abuse Treatment and Education) fund for the LCSO’s new CHAMPS program. CHAMPS stands for Choosing Healthy Activities and Methods Promoting Safety. Created by the Georgia Sheriffs Association, its target audience is fifth-graders, and the money appropriated will go toward buying such items as key chains, T-shirts, pencils, stress balls, etc.
“This is for a great cause,” LCSO Maj. Bill Kirkendall told commissioners.
The program, Kirkendall said, is the sheriff’s office’s attempt to get a message of resistance and education to kids at an early age.
“CHAMPS seeks to engage them about bullying, the drugs that are out there, ways to say no,” he said. “They’re exposed every time they sit down with that smartphone. As parents, we do the best we can.”
To that end, Kirkendall said, they started the program off slow, with 136 fifth-graders at Liberty Elementary this fall. The program has expanded to include fifth-graders at all the county’s elementary schools. They are now in the 10th week of a 12week program, which meets once a week for an hour. Permission slips are sent home with parents for their kids to participate in the program.
Kirkendall said the sheriff’s office is presenting CHAMPS to 630 students this spring. The LCSO also hopes to expand the program to First Preparatory Christian Academy and to Coastal Academy. The LCSO also wants to do the program in the fall and in the spring.
County commissioners also approved spending nearly $651,000 on two new ambulances. EMS Director Crystal Hensler said because the buildout time is much longer now — 18 months instead of what used to be four — she was asking the commissioners for the goahead to buy two units.
“It’s getting longer and longer,” Hensler said of the time from when an ambulance is ordered until its delivery. “Because of these long build times, we’re having to keep our current ambulances on the road a lot longer than we would like to. In a perfect world, we would receive a new ambulance per year.”
The cost for an ambulance also has increased significantly, she said, and that doesn’t include what it takes to stock and equip a unit.
Hensler pointed out that ambulances get routine maintenance monthly but of the nine units, four are reserve ambulances that need work.
“If a current ambulance in service goes down, I don’t have a spare unit,” she said. “This prevents us from putting band-aids on severe wounds on our ambulances. As soon as we can get these new ambulances, we’ll be able to retire our oldest trucks in the fleet. But we haven’t been able to keep up because of the long build time.”
While the number of transports out of the county has decreased, EMS call totals for 2023 topped 9,000, up from the previous year.
Of the ambulances, the one with the most mileage has surpassed 350,000 miles and the unit with the lowest is just over 100,000 miles. Hensler also having the personnel for the ambulances isn’t an issue.
“I have the staff,” she said. “I need the (units).”