Let me take this opportunity to introduce myself and tell you the story of how I became associated and eventually employed at Handel IT. My name is Steve Koenig and I was working as a Director in a juvenile correction facility in Ohio and really enjoyed my job. I enjoyed helping kids and I enjoyed seeing kids change and learn from their mistakes. I often enjoyed the challenges and struggles of working in a state-funded facility and working through the bureaucracy of trying to navigate the rules and politics to get things accomplished. However, in working with various standards and oversight I often became discouraged by the system that was inefficient and outdated; that still relied on paper to track incident reports, Excel spreadsheets to track data, and overall a paper system to run a facility.

In February of 2014 I received a call from the state requesting hours of seclusion in my facility for 2013. As all good Directors would answer–hoping to avoid the pending project–I said, “I didn’t know we were required to track seclusion hours.” Of course, my excuse did not work and the facility not tracking seclusion didn’t resolve the issue. The state kindly informed me that I would need to provide seclusion hours to the state by the end of the workweek. I pulled three staff from their normal job duties and put them on the task of reviewing every incident report from 2013 in order to tabulate seclusion data. All of our incident reports were documented on paper forms, which we had stored in binders, but hundreds of paper documents and hundreds and hundreds of paper forms (6 to 8 binders full) had to be reviewed. I had a great staff who worked very hard and they were able to collect the data in about 4 days, but I was a little hesitant about the validity of the data and concerned whether or not it was completely correct. What if we had missed a page in looking through all the paper binders? Not that my staff weren’t diligent, but they are human and humans make mistakes and this process was rushed and error prone. A few days later after I submitted our report I was thinking that there has to be a better way of doing business in a juvenile correction facility. At the end of February I spoke with my contact at the state and said, “We are now required to meet over 400 standards of ACA, PREA and other state standards but we are using the same process that was used in 1960, a paper process to collect data…there has to be a better way.” My contact agreed and said, “You have a great point; go find something and if it’s the right price and meets your needs then we can explore it further.”

So I began my search. While looking I found a lot of IT companies that were willing to customize a client-based data system to meet our needs but I also found that it would be work intensive and very expensive. I then came upon Handel IT and the RiteTrack software solution. We invited various vendors to do presentations and it became very clear that RiteTrack was the only software that was both cost effective and affordable and that met all of our needs. RiteTrack is a system that helps you to efficiently track, manage and report on the services you provide to your youth. It also allows you as an administrator to manage your facility more effectively, reducing the time spent on paperwork, and allowing more time providing services to the people that you are charged to serve. I became so impressed and inspired by RiteTrack that I chose to join the Handel team. Now my career mission has changed from providing services to youth to going throughout the country to all the youth-serving facilities to share with them a “better way” and the great benefits of the RiteTrack software system.

I look forward to my new opportunities and my new experiences with Handel. I also look forward to meeting new administrators and presenting the RiteTrack software to their various facilities. My hope and my belief is that our software system will benefit your facility allowing you, as service providers, to do more of what we chose this line of work for; allowing us more time to provide youth services while reducing our dependence in paperwork and functioning in outdated and inefficient systems. If you are interested in hearing more about our RiteTrack Juvenile Detention Model, please contact me at steve.koenig@handelit.com. I would appreciate the opportunity to give you a personal or on-line demo about the capabilities of our RiteTrack system.