(Spirit Lake)– Governor Chet Culver’s 10 percent across-the-board budget cuts will trickle down to hit a local agency especially hard.
Rhonda Dean, Executive Director of the Centers Against Abuse and Sexual Assault, tells KUOO news the 10 percent cut proposed for the Department of Human Services budget would result in CAASA having to do away with a preventive education program.
Dean says CAASA’s “Safe Touches” program provides prevention education to area schools for pre-kindergarten through 12th grades. She says the program serves about seven thousand youth a year teaching them about recognizing, resisting and reporting sexual abuse.
Dean says the proposed “adjustment” to the DHS state budget will in fact remove all Sexual Abuse Prevention funding, including that for the Safe Touch program, beginning January 1st, 2010.
As a result, Dean says they “would only be able to work on responding after the incident has happened, not working on preventing it from happening in the first place.”
CAASA provides services to victims of domestic and sexual violence in an eight-county area of northwest Iowa including Buena Vista, Cherokee, Clay, Dickinson, Emmet, Ida, Palo Alto and Sac counties.
