Morgan County employees to take Calhoun harassment-prevention class

Apr. 25—The Morgan County Commission will require all county employees to take a harassment prevention course provided by Calhoun Community College, but the chairman said the decision was not triggered by any incident and no complaints have been filed.

"We don't have an issue with it right now, but it's just good for us to have those classes to remind people where the boundaries are," Morgan County Commission Chairman Ray Long said. "When you have this many employees ... sometimes people may tell you a joke that really you don't want to hear, but they don't realize it."

Long said the class is just a preventative measure.

"Kind of like changing the oil in your car, you want to prevent any damage from happening. So, that's what we want to do here," he said. "This is something we've been planning on doing for a long time, we're just now really getting around to it. ... It's been a long time, if we've ever done one."

The class will be mandatory, Long said, for all county employees. He said the county has about 400 employees and the employees will be split into probably four classes which could be held in Hartselle.

"When you want to involve everybody, it really affects your business," Long said. "The license department, they don't shut down, they send part of their workers. Then the next class, the others. You have to kind of coordinate it and work with everybody."

Long said the jail employees will have similar issues.

"We have a bunch over there on night shift, so we'll probably do a night class for people to get in," he said. "(Human resources) will coordinate that and make sure the classes are timely where everybody can make them."

The county is not qualified to handle such classes in-house, so they will pay Calhoun to teach the course, Long said. At Monday's commission meeting, the commissioners accepted the pricing proposal from Calhoun. Each class will cost $1,895.

"We put money in our budget every year for training and stuff, so this will come out of my budget here," Long said. "That's a pretty cheap price if we can prevent something from happening."

The course name is Approaching Sexual Harassment with Emotional Intelligence and will be taught by Calhoun's contracted leadership instructors.

"Morgan County reached out to us, and it was a very great conversation," director of Calhoun Workforce Solutions Doug Brazier said. "We put together what we thought would be good for them, and they liked it."

The Calhoun pricing proposal for the Morgan County harassment-prevention training says the half-day course has several goals.

"First, of course, to inform and reinforce the basic legal framework of sexual harassment," it says. "Secondly, to use emotional intelligence to help (employees) recognize their own biases and to identify where they might be standing in the way of granting everyone they encounter equal dignity and respect. And, going beyond identification, to understanding and desiring to be part of the solution."

Brazier said the class is a basic course on preventing sexual harassment paired with emotional intelligence.

"It's a lot of self-awareness and self-management. Recognizing your own thoughts and motivations," he said. "Applying emotional intelligence to your everyday work environment to avoid those types of situations."

Brazier said it's a good opportunity for the college and the county.

"We work for the county, we work for you, we work for everybody," he said. "So, we're able to do it at an economical rate that makes it a lot more amenable for government entities and businesses."

Brazier said they teach harassment-prevention courses for industries on a daily basis.

"As far as with government entities, we have not done a lot," he said. "In my tenure here in the last two years, this is our first time with a government entity teaching this particular format."

—erica.smith@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2460.