The School of Social Work will take part in reviewing and assessing child welfare programs nationwide after receiving a grant for more than $1 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in early January, according to SSW professor and project director Mary Collins.
In the investigation, known as the National Evaluation Project, SSW will evaluate deans and administrators of social work schools and submit studies on the value of training people to be child social workers. The school will also complete a comprehensive educational literature review.
“Through a study of federally-funded child welfare programs across the nation, we hope to learn more about what training can accomplish, what are its limitations, and what we can do to improve the training of child welfare workers,” Collins said.
Collins said the grant to study child welfare training is unprecedented.
“The evaluation is completely unique,” she said. “It’s the first time that national attention has been turned toward child welfare training.”
Collins’ team’s work will be submitted to the Children’s Bureau, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as state child-welfare agencies, she said.
The team is composed of SSW professors Cassandra Clay, Maryann Amodeo and Sunny Shin. They will also select three additional BU-affiliated consulting assistants. At least three graduate students have also agreed to participate in the program, according to a BU press release.
The funds will provide for personnel, data collection, travel costs, support for hiring graduate students and an introductory meeting in Washington, D.C. this spring, the release said.
“This is a great opportunity,” Collins said. “There has been a lot of interest in the efficacy of child welfare training methods and a big study of this area is really needed. We have put together a really solid team to carry the project out and I am very excited for it.”
The study’s nine sites have yet to be determined, but Collins said specific sites in California and North Carolina will definitely be included. The study will only include federally funded child welfare training programs that have previously received three-year government grants.
Collins said she and her staff may continue to work on the project once the grant expires and will eventually help implement the findings in child welfare programs nationwide.
Clay said the team will report its findings in two phases, first in the form of material for HHS and later in articles for journals focused on child welfare and learning.
Clay said she and her colleagues are optimistic about the impact the results will have in helping child welfare programs develop more efficient and thorough ways to help foster children prepare for life on their own.
“We feel that the grant will make a critical impact in terms of evaluating child welfare and training in order to determine which methods bring about positive outcomes,” Clay said. “Then we can use this information to develop better and more sophisticated models. We feel that this could make a major contribution.”