Leaders of the Michael H. Seibel Visitation and Exchange Center received the news they’d been waiting for.

Director Heather Steinkamp informed the county board Tuesday that the center received a three-year, $400,000 grant from the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women.

“It was very, very good news,” she said.

The center acts as a secure location for children to have visitation with their parents or for exchanges between visitations.

The grant will help the center provide scholarships to keep families from paying high prices to use the center.

About $50,000 a year will go toward technical assistance, which will be for training for judges, law enforcement, social workers and other area officials. Some of those dollars will also go to the Crime Victims Resource Center.

“It is huge news for us,” Steinkamp said.

Grant dollars are important for the center, but they’ve become hard to come by. Before the annual Sweets and Sounds fundraiser for the center in August, Steinkamp talked about how the center had missed out on recent grants.

In 2006, the Seibel Center was going up for grants with about 13 other organizations, and now Steinkamp said hundreds of organizations recently applied for these grant dollars and about 20 received the funding.

The grant was good news during what Steinkamp said has otherwise been a difficult time, with many organizations having to make cuts.

“It’s been a tough year for families,” she said.