Ohio, Maryland SCSEP leaders weigh in at 'feedback session'

Dr. Ellen-Marie Whelan, aide to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, greets Henry Trogdon, now a staff member at the Baltimore County Department on Aging, who had been a SCSEP participant after leaving an engineering job to care for his ailing mother and, later, his two nieces, ages 12 and 13, following the death of their mother, Trogdon's sister.

“Don’t fix it if it’s not broken,” Arnold J. Eppel, executive director of the Baltimore County Department of Aging, urged this week in testimony at a “feedback” session of a Congressional subcommittee reviewing the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) as part of the reauthorization of the Older Americans Act.

While senators were on a two-week break, their aides heard testimony Monday about the Older Americans Act. Senior Service America’s president and executive director, Anthony R. Sarmiento, was among those invited to testify in an allotted 15-minute period. He shared his time with two leaders of SSAI local SCSEP partners, Eppel, of Towson, Md., and Sharon Minturn, president of the Senior Resource Connection, Dayton, Ohio.

Sarmiento presented arguments for the continuation of national grantees, based on an analysis of DOL data it had provided to the GAO, which was presented to a Senate committee earlier this month. The data showed that “an overwhelming majority of national SCSEP grantees met or exceeded” all of DOL’s SCSEP goals for 2004, Sarmiento noted.

Eppel, a delegate to the recent White House Conference on Aging, talked about SCSEP’s long track record and the importance of paid on-the-job training for participants, while they provide valuable service to community agencies. “Here’s a program that’s working and been working,” he said.

The Senior Resource Connection in Dayton has placed SCSEP participants in 41 agencies where they provide meaningful work while learning job skills, Minturn said, and “many of those programs would not be operating if not for the Senior Aides,” she said. They work as drivers, care providers for children and in private  homes, train as nurse assistants, and work in libraries, employment officers and after-school reading programs, she said.

She said the program offers “ample opportunity” for training participants through GED classes and community colleges, without taking away funds designated for the wages of SCSEP participants.

She also talked about benefits of working with a national organization, as Senior Resource Center has for many years. Among the most important, she said, has been the opportunity to exchange ideas with counterparts across the country. “Seniors would get very lost without this program,” she said. “It is extremely important that this program continue as it is.”

Others accompanying Sarmiento to the hearing included SCSEP project directors Patti Madigan of the Baltimore County Department of Aging, Lisa Stroman of the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Corp, and Jamescha Johnson of Prince Georges County Department of Family Services; Henry Trogdon, a former SCSEP participant who is now a staff member at  the Baltimore County Department of Aging; Marie Earlington-Crawford of West County Family Support Center, a host agency; and SCSEP participants Barbara Troublefield, Ho Kim, and Edna Munden.