ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 15, 1996 TAG: 9610150064
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: Reporter's Notebook
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE
Dawn Barnes has worked for Virginia Cooperative Extension in Floyd County for more than eight years.
But it's only been recently that she's become the key agent aiding families with their financial and housing problems. Make that the key agent aiding families in six counties with those problems.
"If we're going to be programming in six counties, it's definitely better to connect by computer, instead of getting in the car and having to drive from Floyd to Giles," she said.
And so you have one step on the road to restructuring, as practiced by Cooperative Extension.
It's been a year since the agency, a key component of Virginia Tech, unveiled the latest and most sweeping version of internal reform - the result of years of deep budget cuts. Last week, the new director of extension, Clark Jones, issued an update of how the restructuring is going.
"This hasn't been an easy process, but because of the commitment of everyone within Virginia Cooperative Extension, we are on track," Jones said in a statement. "I'm pleased with the effort being made throughout the organization."
The point of restructuring has been threefold: to produce more outside funding (and therefore be less dependent on state aid), refocusing on agriculture and "homemaking" (extension's original duties lo those many years ago), and streamlining administration.
Among outside funding sources: $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a program to teach food stamp recipients better nutrition and how to budget their money and food stamps so they'll get more nutritious meals. Separate from that, some localities have asked extension to help with educational programming - such as monthly budgeting - as localities make the transformation through welfare reform, said Charlie Stott, extension spokesman.
Meantime, back in the field offices, people like Barnes are using new technology to communicate with their fellow workers as they go about helping families. At the moment, she says e-mailing fellow agents or other contacts is her chief use of the Internet, but she's also finding a lot of programming on line that she otherwise might never have discovered.
"The nice thing with the extension homepage, besides connecting us directly with Tech, [it] connects us with all the other extensions in other states," she said. "So you're not reinventing the wheel to develop the resources yourself."
In other words, the home-budgeting instruction booklet an agent might once have learned about while chit-chatting at a conference now is discovered with a click of the mouse.
"You might have to go the traditional route to send the check" and receive the materials, but "it opens the world up," Barnes said.
So while restructuring's been no fun, maybe parts of it aren't so bad after all.
To reach the extension homepage, type: http://www.ext.vt.edu/
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