Bourbon CASA volunteer honored with Serve Kentucky Award
A Bourbon County CASA volunteer was honored by the Bourbon County Fiscal Court Thursday for giving 183 hours to help abused and neglected children in 2025.
Patricia Agront will receive a Serve Kentucky Award signed by Gov. Andy Beshear in recognition of her volunteer service. Agront was unable to attend the court meeting, but CASA Volunteer Manager Weida Allen accepted the award on her behalf.
CASA Volunteer and Serve Kentucky Award recipient Patricia Agront
The Serve Kentucky Volunteer Recognition Program is a partnership among the Office of the Governor, AmeriCorps, and the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. It recognizes volunteers who make a difference by giving their time within the state of Kentucky.
CASA volunteers are matched with children in the family court system who have been abused or neglected. Each volunteer visits their CASA child at least monthly, gathers information about the child’s life, provides reports to the judge on the child’s case, and speaks up if the child needs something they aren’t getting.
Bourbon’s CASA program used 15 volunteers to serve 34 children in 2025. CASA’s Executive Director Melynda Jamison said that represents roughly 32% of all the children who have open abuse or neglect cases in Bourbon County.
“We’d like it to be 100 percent. But Bourbon County is one of the top counties in the entire state in terms of percentage served,” Jamison said. “The average around the state is close to 5 percent, unfortunately.”
Children who receive CASA volunteers can do better in school, receive more services ordered by the judge, and be far less likely to be abused or neglected again.
Jamison said she is grateful to Bourbon County and the City of Paris for providing the funding that enabled the CASA of Lexington program to become a regional program and expand to serve Bourbon County in 2017. Since that time, the program has expanded five more times, each time following the model built in Bourbon, with the local governments providing some of the funding for a CASA Volunteer Manager to serve the county.
In Bourbon County, the CASA Volunteer Manager is well-known resident Weida Allen.
“We have some great volunteers,” Judge-Executive Mike Williams said of the Bourbon CASA program. “Weida is their leader and their trainer. Melynda is certainly a superstar among directors across the country. We are very fortunate to have their presence here.”
Jamison said there is “still room to grow” but she is proud of the Bourbon County CASA program’s success.
“Bourbon County is really leading the Commonwealth in making sure that as many of these children get a CASA advocate as possible,” she said.
It takes about 5 to 10 hours a month to serve as a CASA volunteer. If you are interested in becoming a CASA volunteer, supporting the Bourbon County CASA program or learning more about what CASA volunteers do, visit www.casaoflexington.org.