Meet Jaime Freeman – LCC Class of 2022
Jaime Freeman grew up in Millersport, a small village located on the shores of Buckeye Lake in nearby Fairfield County. She attended Millersport High School, where she was active in athletics, including volleyball, basketball and softball, as well as National Honor Society and the German Club.
Summers were spent as lifeguard at the village pool. Graduating with a class of approximately 60 in 2008, Freeman attended OSU-Newark Campus, with intentions to move to the main campus and continue her coursework in business. She felt at home on the Newark Campus and enjoyed her employment in campus dining and catering, so Freeman changed majors to psychology, earning a Bachelor of Arts. Like many, she had intended to go on for her Masters’ and eventually PhD, but following a year off of school, never returned.
During that time, Freeman worked at Park National Bank, and also with a nearby caterer, as a wedding planner. In 2015, while employed with Park, she met David Rice, a River View graduate and Union Laborer out of the Newcomerstown Local and moved to the Coshocton area and to his family farm. In 2016, Freeman began her career in public service, with Licking County Child Support.
Wanting to stay within the same line of work, but work closer to home, Freeman accepted a case manager position in the Coshocton County Department of Job and Family Services (DJFS) Child Support Division in 2017, and in 2018 took on a new role as the divisions administrative hearing officer. In this capacity, Freeman worked to establish paternity, child support orders, as well as other administrative processes. She stated that her position as an administrative hearing officer helped in her new role, as she already had an understanding of the Ohio Administrative Code and Ohio Revised Code, of which child support orders rely heavily on. Freeman also said that in this role she “appreciated being able to help people understand the process and how it works.” Her goal was, and continues to be, to “form a better relationship with the people” served by child support. In 2021 the opportunity to take on a leadership role within her department became available, and Freeman stepped up to accept the position of administrator of child support enforcement.
While part of Freeman’s position is to oversee the employees within child support, her passion is really about educating the public about child support as well as the department of job and family services. She said, “Child Support has a bad name; I want to change that perception. I want to change the relationship with the community and offer information and assistance whenever I can. Everybody needs to understand their rights and what the agency is capable of doing.” She goes on to clarify that child support is not just about “collecting money” but rather to provide support to all parties involved with the care of a child- custodial as well as non-custodial parents. Child support makes referrals to other agencies to help with needs such as employment; education/obtaining a GED; PRC (Prevention; Retention; Contingency) and is very proud of the partnership child support has with the Coshocton County Fatherhood Initiative and Family PACT. Family PACT benefits the families involved in the child support program by providing mediation services regarding visitation. Freeman said, “Child support does not have authority over custody or visitation” and it is through the partnership with Family PACT that referrals can be made to keep families out of court to resolve such issues; thus, saving those families time as well as money. She also has a personal connection to the child support program because she “was a child of the program from a single-parent home with a parent who didn’t always pay on time.” From her personal experience, Freeman understands that “both parents are important.”
Because of her role with child support, Freeman serves on the Fatherhood Initiative Committee and also participates in a statewide director’s association and committee to help ensure the program stays up to date and with software changes to modernize the state’s tracking system. While she would like to be involved with other organizations and volunteer, at this time Freeman is focusing on getting comfortable in her new position before taking on any additional roles.
Freeman decided to participate in Leadership Coshocton County because she “didn’t know anyone or anything about the county or community.” In her time living in Coshocton, she has gotten excited about the changes taking place in Coshocton and knows participating in LCC would be “a benefit personally and professionally to know more about the county.” Through participation, Freeman hopes to gain community connections through the people she meets as well as greater personal connections with local organizations and networking. She appreciated learning “the history of the county, and of the buildings especially, as she felt a stronger connection to the people and the community.”
Freeman sees the community as “in transition;” stating, “When I first started with DJFS, I heard about businesses leaving. But in the short time I’ve been here, there are business moving in; the housing market has improved, and the community is turning around.” She appreciates seeing people taking time to improve the area and likes seeing the community “pull itself up by the bootstraps.”
To make the county stronger, Freeman would like to see people taking interest in the change happening as a collective and have less focus on taking on change themselves individually. More focus on “what’s good for the community to make the area stronger; promote the strengths of the community and connect people. Help each other and focus on what we can achieve as a collective rather than doing it all by ourselves.”
Freeman would recommend Leadership Coshocton as a benefit to people from the community, as a way to refocus on the future and less on the past. She also believes it is “very good for transplants to increase a personal connection to the area; as a way to tie roots down.” She said she “felt greater ties to Coshocton after learning canal history and saw a connection to Millersport via the canal system in Coshocton.”
In closing, Freeman wanted to stress that the “people in her agency are more than just their jobs or the agency. We’re people, too, who care about the community. We’re not just the reputations of our agency; we want to be seen as active members of the community.”
Category: Clubs & Organizations
