• By SARAH CHACKO
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Sep 13, 2009

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Louisiana universities are taking steps to improve the state’s child-welfare system with a targeted curriculum for students and specialized training for social workers.

Federal grant money is helping seven state universities focus their curriculum on areas where child-welfare workers need the most support, such as finding ways to help children who have been abused and neglected, and dealing with their own work-related stress.

“Louisiana is one of the few states in the country that does not have a specialized child-welfare discipline within its university systems,” DSS Secretary Kristy Nichols told a state Commission on Streamlining Government.

Nichols said the child-welfare work force is one of her biggest concerns in the department.

Child-welfare case workers are sent to help families either learn to better care for their abused or neglected children or move those children to another home. The field is riddled with high turnover, low training and a large proportion of workers who are not trained in clinical social work, Nichols said.

Currently, new case workers, many with bachelor’s degrees in fields outside of social work, receive three-week training and then are sent to work with “households in the worst conditions and situations” and asked to do work that is “extremely complex,” she said.

Northwestern State University is administering $3 million in grant money from the federal Health and Human Services Department, through DSS, over three years to it and six other universities for student stipends and employee training.

The $3 million grant is a recurring program, but state officials say the new focus to improve areas of weakness within the system should result in better-equipped social workers.

Kaaren Hebert, assistant secretary of DSS’ Office of Community Services, said as universities develop more expertise and provide more training to child-welfare staff, they can draw down more federal money.

Northwestern also is helping LSU distribute another one-time grant it received from the same federal agency’s Children’s Bureau for similar work. That grant, which amounts to $2.5 million over five years, sets up the Louisiana Child Welfare Comprehensive Workforce Project.

In addition to stipends and training, LSU School of Social Work Dean Christian Molidor said the university is using the Children’s Bureau grant to create a certificate program for child-welfare students, which would require a research project and internship.

It will also create a specific training program for supervisors, some of whom are put in those positions before they are ready, he said.

Hebert said the goal is to have everyone who enters the social work field to have the same “core set of competencies” in child welfare.