To our 4-H Families:
It has been a quite a couple of weeks with changes coming quickly. Thank you for your patience with your county 4-H staff, the state 4-H office and OSU Extension. I know you have many questions:
- When can we have club meetings?
- Will there be summer camp?
- Should we invest in projects?
- What about fair?
The answer is at this point, we just don’t know. It is all changing rapidly. But what we do know for sure is that we’re committed to doing our part to help prevent the spread of the corona virus. We also know that when we choose to act together, we can have incredible positive impacts.
The actions we’ve taken so far are in alignment with necessary precautions recommended by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Ohio Department of Health. These are in place to help keep us all from getting, or unintentionally spreading, this virus. This includes the temporary closing to the public of our county Extension office. We’ll continue to be available via email and phone.
Phone: 740-695-1455
Email: Keyser.1@osu.edu or Antill.19@osu.edu
To help clarify, ALL 4-H events, programs, and activities scheduled between now and April 20 be held virtually, postponed, or cancelled.
4-H Project Book Distribution
We are also suspending 4-H project book distribution, effective as of 3/18/2020 through 3/31/2020. This means there will be no project book distribution at the local or state level until after March 31. We will continue to monitor the coronavirus situation and will re-evaluate project book distribution as we get closer to March 31 and share more information with you at that time.
Enrollment & Deadlines
Due to Belmont County still having paper copy enrollments, forms shall be mailed via USPS and will be retrieved and processed when OSU Extension staff are able to return from their temporary, mandatory teleworking arrangements or when OSU Extension staff are able to retrieve postal mail. Deadlines will be adjusted accordingly. Volunteers and families also have the option to scan documents or send pictures of documents to antill.19@osu.edu for processing. Hard copies can then be mailed to the Extension Office or dropped off once OSU Extension staff return from teleworking. Again, deadlines will be adjusted due to circumstances.
OSU Extension Belmont County
101 North Market Street, Suite A
St. Clairsville, OH 43950
For our livestock project members and families, Ohio 4-H and the Ohio Department of Agriculture discussed some changes for this year that will help mitigate the effects the corona virus is having on holding in-person programming. For livestock quality assurance (QA) for the 2020 year only:
- QA must still be completed before the opening day of exhibition, however the 45-day prior to the opening of the exhibition requirement will not be enforced.
- Youth livestock exhibitors (8-18) may take the online YQCA certification.
In the coming days, we’ll post updates on our social media pages (Facebook and Instagram), 4-H Blog and OSU Extension website. We’ll also include links to resources that you and your children can use. And we’ll do what we can to keep you updated as we learn new information.
Please continue to take care of yourselves and know that we do not expect everything to continue as it normally would have. This is a huge period of adjustment for all of us. We appreciate your continued patience – we’ll get through this together. Don’t fret over deadlines for enrollments or how you are going to get that Livestock Quality Assurance training complete or getting your volunteer 1.50 training done. We are going to all work together make sure we get everything accomplished with some adjustments and accommodations!
Thank you,
Belmont County 4-H Professionals and State 4-H Office