Oconto County department heads congratulated on their retirement

Two longtime Oconto County department heads were given recognition during the Feb. 18 county board meeting as they retire.

Penny Helmle, manager of the Economic Support Division, has spent almost 40 years with the county, and Joy Hogan, director of the Child Support Division, is stepping down after 33 years.

“The department was known as the Welfare Office when she started,” Health & Human Services Director Mike Reimer told the board. Helmle “has taken this county through all of the changes that have happened since then.”

Among those changes is the mid-1990s shift from programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children to the Wisconsin Works system, which Reimer said privatized and regionalized the system, channeling more state dollars into those regional offices in places like Green Bay.

“Penny saw this and saw that our county residents still need care,” Reimer said, and she obtained grants totalling $750,000 over the years that targeted the needs of homeless, low-income and other vulnerable families. She helped establish a five-county work-incentive consortium and “made sure we wouldn’t get missed in a regional model.”

Most significantly Helmle spearheaded the New Beginnings store and employment training program, which is about to undergo a $1.4 million expansion.

“When Penny started New Beginnings, many people didn’t think it would survive,” Reimer said. “This May, it’ll be celebrating its 20th anniversary.”

Helmle said she couldn’t have started any of the new programs or had grant-writing success without her staff, and she thanked the board for its support over the years.

“Remember to trust your county staff when they tell you what’s going on in the county,” Helmle told the board. She also said she enjoyed all these years of serving the county. “Every day is a new day; just when you think you’ve seen everything, something else happens. I’ve never been bored.”

Hogan also has seen a lot of changes over the years, working to ensure that single parents got the support they needed for their children.

“When I started, we did everything by hand,” Hogan said. “Now we’re on our second computer system.”

She greeted the supervisors with Trip, her latest service dog in training. Four of her trainees over the years have gone on to the Leader Dogs for the Blind program; four other have become family pets. Trip, she said, will become a reading specialist, listening to children read.

County Board Chairman Paul Bednarek thanked both women for their years of service to the board and wished them well in the future.

The board hired Hogan’s successor during its regular monthly meeting, approving a resolution giving the position to Christopher Brooks, most recently a child support specialist with Outagamie County.