The Mower County board gave permission to seek a three-year, $100,000 grant for intensive home visits to at-risk pregnant women.

The grant, given by the state Department of Health, would fund Public Health nurses and social workers to go to homes of high-risk families before and after a baby is born to educate parents on proper child-rearing. High-risk families are typically families in poverty, among other factors.

The grant comes after Mower County was identified as one of seven counties with large populations of high-risk families as well as pregnancy complications.

“That’s not where we want to be at,” board chairman Tim Gabrielson said.

Lisa Kocer, interim Public Health director, will apply to the grant, which county officials say will be automatically given.

The grant means county officials will concentrate on high-risk families instead of some of the low-risk homes they have normally visited.

“We will not be servicing some of these low-risk families anymore,” County Coordinator Craig Oscarson said.

Studying Human Services

Oscarson updated the board on what could be some big changes coming to Mower County Human Services.

Mower County is one of 12 counties in southeast Minnesota studying how to combine aspects of county human service departments in order to save money.

“It’s about sharing services, sharing staff, maybe locating certain staff in one county,” Oscarson said.

Oscarson has been a member of the Southeast Minnesota Counties Human Services Redesign Project for a couple years. It was only within the past several months that representatives from each county — Mower, Steele, Dodge, Rice, Fillmore, Houston, Olmsted, Winona, Wabasha, Goodhue, Freeborn, and Waseca — decided to fund what could be the final study to see how efficient combining parts of human services departments could be. For example, one county could house the region’s accounting staff for all human service departments or social workers in three or four counties could work on adoption cases for all 12 counties.

“It really is more of an effort to look at not necessarily merging the counties but looking at if there is a possibility to share services,” Oscarson said.