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Helping
the Helpless
MU School of Social Work launches program
to train those who protect children
Every day, the front pages of newspapers across the country contain
stories of children who have been neglected or simply disappeared
while in foster care, infants who have been killed by abusive
parents despite social service authorities having received numerous
reports of the abuse, or caring couples investing years trying
to adopt a child and facing one obstacle after another in a system
that moves much too slow.
Many researchers believe problems that exist within state child-welfare
systems across the nation are a result of high employee turnover
rates. Often supervisors within these offices lack training to
adequately oversee these programs. This also creates poor working
environments for employees.
In an effort to combat these problems, the School
of Social Work in the College
of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia
recently received a grant for more than $437,000 from the federal
Children’s Bureau to develop, implement and evaluate a three-year
training program for supervisors in the Missouri
Division of Family Services (DFS). These supervisors oversee
an array of issues related to child welfare. Faculty in the School
of Social Work hope that additional training for these supervisors
will improve the quality of care provided to children under the
protection of the DFS and similar offices across the country.
“Supervisors are the most critical component of a child
protective services system,” said Paul Sundet, principal
investigator for the project and associate professor emeritus
of social work at MU. “Advanced clinical training of supervisors
is a function we are uniquely qualified to provide and bodes well
for the University’s land-grant mission.”
Researchers at the MU School of Social Work developed the training
model in collaboration with the DFS. Using this model, the school
will implement training programs in St. Louis and southwest Missouri.
These programs will then be compared to control groups to determine
their effectiveness. The University of Alabama School of Social
Work, the Arkansas Division of Children and Family Services, and
the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services also have
received grants to launch training programs.
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Copyright © 2007 — Curators of the University of Missouri
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Last Update:
March 12, 2007
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