9/25/14 Erich Eggers and Shelley Fisher
10/2/14 Ed Flohre and Cynthia Fraley
10/9/14 Jim Briggs and Dick Hoback
10/16/14 Mark Balsan and Pat Beckel
If you cannot greet on the day assigned, contact Kitty and she will schedule a replacement.
9/18/14
President Vas Appalaneni opened the Centerville Rotary Club meeting at The Clubhouse at Yankee Trace with the Pledge of Allegiance. Member Harvey Smith gave the prayer and member Peachy Metzner led the singing of God Bless America.
The guests at the meeting included: Visiting past club member Bill Reber, and our speaker, Honorable Judge Dennis Adkins of the Montgomery County Common Pleas Court.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
President Vas Appalaneni announced the club has agreed to donate $1,000 to fund two special needs students at Centerville High School in the We Care Arts program.for a year. The funding will include paying for their art supplies.
Pancake Breakfast Committee Co-chair Gerry Eastabrooks reminded members of the Sept. 19 Centerville Rotary Fund-raiser day at Bob Evans. The Pancake Breakfast Committee met there at 11:30 a.m. (See photo)
Peachy Metzner said the dictionaries and thesauri should be in during the next two weeks, and assembly and delivery will follow after that, so volunteers to help put in labels and deliver the books will be needed. He advised anyone new to Rotary to consider taking one of the introduction to Rotary day-long programs offered by the district. Club President Vas Appalaneni said he believed the club would pay for the expense.
HAPPY BUCKS:
Member Gary Kuntz, who is looking for his ID badge, stood in for Erich Eggers as Sgt.-at-Arms, gathering Happy Bucks from the members by challenging them with his knowledge of Miami University and its football program. He gathered dollars from members, and some also gave for the Operation Warm program, with Ron Hollenbeck giving $50 and Dave Trout, Ed Flohre, and Tom Zobrist among those donating $20, the cost of a coat.
SPEAKER: Club member Joyce Young introduced our speaker for the day, the Honorable Judge Dennis Adkins, who runs the Veterans Treatment Court in Montgomery County to help give justice for military veterans.
The court is designed to assist veterans involved in the criminal justice system. It is voluntary and includes regular court appearances before a designated VTC judge and a treatment plan created specifically for each veteran.
Judge Adkins said they are working with the Department of Veterans Affairs , the Montgomery County Probation Department and other community agencies. The work does not cost taxpayers any additional funds, as those involved in helping are already funded through their own agencies, he said.
The program is designed to help those veterans who run into difficulties with the law, committing crimes because of various reasons, from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or other trauma, mental health, substance abuse and related disorders.
Judge Adkins, who started out as a police officer and was a prosecuting attorney, before becoming a judge with the Montgomery County Common Pleas Court, said he grew up in Kettering and moved to Washington Twp. in 1987.
His brother suffered from PTSD, he said, so he has first-hand knowledge of the problems people can have after their war experiences.
Adkins said he became known early on for his son Jeremy's exploits on the football field at Miami University. A running back, he earned a full scholarship to Miami. He became a stockbroker and now works for DeWalt Tools.
Judge Adkins said that in 2013 it was brought to his attention that many of the people convicted of crimes were military or ex-military veterans who had not been involved in the criminal justice system until they were in the military. Unlike in previous wars, he said, many of these people had served two, three, four, five, six, seven or eight tours of duty. They were coming back as different people, he said. "Some were perfectly okay and successful," he said, but others suffered from PTSD, brain trauma, substance abuse, etc. Some who lost limbs and ran out of their medication turned to drugs on the street and then to crime.
The object of the Veterans Treatment Court is to try to rehabilitate them so they do not repeat the crimes, he said.
To be eligible for treatment, the veteran must plead guilty to the crime he or she committed and must be deemed eligible by the Department of Veteran Affairs eligibility requirements. The veteran must also have a willingness to engage the services provided. According to the brochure handed out by Judge Adkins, entry into the treatment program can occur at multiple points of a case, including: intervention in lieu of conviction, post sentencing, probation violation, or sentence mitigation.
The veteran will go through a number of phases of treatment, meeting with someone from the mental health department at the VA, Adkins said. They will meet with a probation officer and a jobs coordinator. They will also enter a mentoring program with another veteran who can help them through the process.
Adkins said they had eight people in the first docket in December, 2013 and now have over 50 in the program. "We've already seen some success stories," he said. He showed a short video in which a number of people in the program told how it had helped them change their lives. It also gave some of the statistics of the effects of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that one in five veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan war suffer from PTDS and that there are 22 veteran suicides a day. One in six suffer from substance abuse, according to the video. The VTC programs gives Veterans a second chance, said Judge Wendy Lindsey in the video.
Adkins said there are 130 such VTCs across the country, though his is the only one around this area. He said today's military veterans are among the most generous, in that many have volunteered for numerous tours of duty. "If anyone deserves a second chance, it's our veterans," he said.
He's had a number of veterans who went through the program tell him he helped save their lives, but he said he tells them, they were the ones who saved themselves. "We gave you the tools to do it," he tells them.
If the veterans do not successfully complete the program they face possible incarceration, he said, which gives them an incentive to work with the program and help rebuild their family and community ties and live a drug and crime-free life.
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