Placement of jquery in admin panel at bottom in 2.5.2

I'm using jquery in my /perch/addons/plugins/ui/_config.inc file and am suddenly getting an error for $ not found after updating to Perch 2.5.2. It worked previously, so I'm wondering if maybe there was a change in where jquery is called in to the page (I see it's at the bottom of the document now... not sure if it was previously *before* the _config.inc inclusion).

Perhaps there is a way to get around this you can suggest? Or maybe _config.inc could be included *after* the standard Perch items at the bottom of the document so we can access jquery?