Re: Continuing education for CAN professionals

[Rocco Cimmarusti <rcimmaru@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, Debbie Wolcott wrote:
...snip 
> Rather than a clinical approach
> to intervention, one may explore the implementation of mandatory
> continuing education for professionals working in the field of child
> abuse and neglect.  To examine more fully evaluate this research
> issue, several initial questions come to mind:
> 
> Has anyone attempted to track the impact of  mandatory legislation for
> continuing education of child abuse and neglect professionals on
> maltreatment reports and/or fatalities?
> 
> Do any states currently require these professionals to participating
> in continuing education activities?
> 
> Is the requirement through state legislation or through agency
> policies?

In Illinois in 1995, the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS)
mandated its supervisors of child protection and child welfare
units to have a masters degree.  To accomplish this mandate, the civil
service position for supervisor had to be changed to Public Service
Administrator.  Additionally, DCFS entered an agreement with local schools
of social work to pay for the returning students. This was called the
Social Work Educational Program (SWEP) and here at Aurora we have 27
SWEP'ers.  I am their advisor.  Statewide, I believe, 160 supervisors
returned to school.  Failure to take the opportunity to return to school
resulted in reassignment to non-supervisory positions.

In Cook County (Chicago) the supervisors were under the union, so it
wasn't as easy to pressure them back into school.  Further, at first only
having an MSW was acceptable, but I believe that that requirement has been
relaxed to include any pertinent master's degree. Still only the social
work degree was part of the SWEP program.

I submitted a proposal to DCFS, that built upon some work of some of my
students, to evaluate the program.  The methodology proposed involved a
pre/post measure used to evaluate training programs that had the
participants identify action plans for using the training at T1 and an
evaluation of the degree the action plan has been met at T2. It's called
PAPA (Participant Action Plan Approach) and was used by Austin and Pecora
(Evaluating supervisory training: the participant action plan approach.
_Journal_of_Continuing_Social_Work_Education_, 3[3], 1985). Was told that
they liked the proposal, but they needed to look for the money to fund it
(BTW we're talking a bit over 80k over three years, here).  That was a
year ago.  Oh well, no sense complaining.

The Illinois experience is a real opportunity to evaluate the impact of
mandatory training to child welfare professionals on supervisory
practice, casemanagement practice of staff, and at the effectiveness of
practice. Clearly there are still ways to examine the issue and you
suggest some in you post.  It saddens me that at this point we in Illinois
have not found such an evaluation to be a funding priority.

Rocco

===============================================================================
Rocco A. Cimmarusti, LCSW		347 South Gladstone Avenue
Instructor				Aurora, Illinois 60506-4892
School of Social Work			Office: 630.844.5792
Aurora University			FAX:	630.844.4923
		E-mail:	rcimmaru@admin.aurora.edu
===============================================================================