County starting safety training classes next week

Hill County will start hosting WorkSafe Champions’ classes for its employees starting next Wednesday in an attempt to lower the county’s unusually high workers’ compensation rates.

Hill County Safety Coordinator Sheri Williams, who’s spent the last few months setting up these classes and getting the county’s departments on board with it, said her goal in bringing these classes to the county is to improve its safety culture, prevent accidents and save taxpayers money.

The program is a safety education program under the Montana State Fund that offers classes to businesses and local governments to help them develop safer work cultures and eliminate unnecessary injuries on the job.

Williams said Hill County has one of the highest workers’ compensation rates of counties in the state and she’s hoping this free education program will provide information to the employees of all departments that they can use to improve the safety culture of the county.

She said some county work is inherently dangerous and there will always be situations that can’t be predicted and prevented.

She said workers’ compensation will always be necessary to some degree, but many claims are for incidents that were preventable, and while many of these claims are small, more work needs to be done to keep them from happening.

“All those smaller claims add up,” she said.

Williams said these classes aren’t just good for employees, but also for taxpayers, who ultimately fund the county’s workers’ compensation through taxes going into the county budget.

“It’s a big, big deal,” she said.

She said she’s gotten people from every department on board with these classes, which consist of nine hour- to 90-minute-long modules teaching employees about things like risk management, safety regulations, guided self-assessment and other topics.

She said the classes are designed to keep people engaged and enjoy their time, but it is something that people need to take seriously and attend if they’ve signed up for it.

“The whole county needs to be on board with this,” she said.

Williams said she’s been working on setting up these classes up since July, visiting with department heads and explaining the program and its merits, gathering signatures and participants and coordinating with people at the program.

She said she brought the program up to the commission herself some time ago but wasn’t getting much traction, but after she brought in people from the program itself, the commissioners agreed that it was worth looking into.

Since then, she said, putting all this together has been a tremendous amount of work on top of her normal duties as the Hill County Commission’s administrative assistant, already a full-time job.

Williams said she offered to be the county’s safety coordinator, duties she originally split with an administrative assistant at the Hill County Road Department, because no one was stepping up and the county really needed one.

She said it was also because she had some experience with safety training as someone who once ran her own day care, which requires quite a bit of safety training and certification from the state.

Williams said her partner as safety coordinator eventually stepped down because she wasn’t being compensated for the time they spent on job and because it was just too great a workload to handle on top of their full-time position.

Since then, Williams said, she’s been effectively working two full-time jobs, and has had to put in a lot of off-the-clock time making sure this program gets set up.

“I can’t even tell you how many hours I’ve put into this,” she said.

Williams said it’s been exhausting to do, but it’s great to see the classes finally coming together and she’s excited to see people getting involved.