by Sonja Koukel
Capitol City Weekly

As the recently hired Food Stamp Nutrition educator, Helen Idzorek works with individuals, families and community organizations to offer programs designed to assist food stamp recipients in stretching their food dollars and enjoying healthy, nutritious meals. Helen's goal is to provide educational programs that increase, within a limited budget, the likelihood of all food stamp recipients being able to make healthy food choices.

Beginning October 17th 2005 DHSS Information Technology Services (ITS) Customer Services will assume responsibility for Information Systems customer support previously provided by DPA Network Services staff. ITS Customer Services has three Customer Services “Information Systems Help Desks" and technical teams in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks. There are local phone numbers for these locations and a toll-free number for all other outlying areas. We also have a centralized “Information Systems Help Desk" email. Customer Services technicians are available to respond to calls and emails Monday through Friday 7am to 5pm. The specific contact information is posted below.

Please note that beginning 10/07/2005 and ending 10/19/2005, you may experience noise or service interruptions because AT&T Alascom satellite facilities will be experiencing sun related service degradations as a result of the alignment of the sun with Alaska telecommunications satellite and ground stations. Sun outages occur for a few days semi-annually when the satellite passes directly between the antenna on earth and the sun. Radio frequency noise from the sun is stronger than the desired signal from the satellite, resulting in a brief service interruption.

The QA results are nearly complete for May. We did make further progress toward our Food Stamp Program goal of 94% payment accuracy. The accuracy rate is now at 93.2%. Our statistician tells me that if we finish as strongly as we did during the final months last year, we can still reach our goal. Your daily attention to the many details that assure our ongoing work quality is appreciated. Good as we've done, there's still a way to go to for us to better the national payment accuracy average of 95.5%.

DPA Overview - June, 2005

Here is the Division Overview newsletter that was released in June. It has been available on the public DPA website under the "Headlines" section and you can also view it by clicking on the link above. We have had a very enthusiastic response about this newsletter from our state partners, fellow divisions, members of the Alaska Workforce Investment Board, and many others. Our partners appreciated the report and thought it was 'best practice' in communicating to our broad stakeholders - and also tells the terrific story of your hard work and DPA's results as well! We intend to update this newsletter every six months or so with news of our efforts and outcomes.