University Times

Pitt's School of Social Work has received a $20.5 million grant to coordinate training for child welfare professionals throughout the state and improve services to at-risk children and families.

The grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare and the U.S. Administration for Children and Families will underwrite the first year of a three-year, statewide education and planning program for public child welfare.

At a Sept. 10 news conference, Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg said: "This is one of the largest grants ever received by the University of Pittsburgh, and it cements Pitt's place as the home of one of the nation's premier schools of social work, and as the Commonwealth's leader in the education of child welfare professionals.

"This work will not only advance the skills and professionalism of these crucial service providers, it also will help improve the quality of life for Penn-sylvania's children," Nor-denberg said.

Public child welfare agencies in Pennsylvania investigated 22,809 suspected cases of child abuse last year, said Pitt social work professor Edward W. Sites, who is principal investigator for the project. Programs funded by the grant will better train caseworkers to investigate these cases and link children and families with needed services, Sites said.

Programs include:

* The Child Welfare Education for Leadership (CWEL) program, through which Pitt and five other universities provide graduate professional education for county children and youth agency employees. The 300 CWEL graduates to date have had an 87 percent retention rate on the job — "the highest in the nation, as far as we know," Sites said. The new funding will increase the program's capacity by 75 percent, he added.

* A new undergraduate version of CWEL called Child Welfare Education for Baccalaureates. CWEB will provide social work degrees with child welfare content for undergrads at Pitt and 13 other state schools.

* A competency-based training program that will provide some 10,000 days of legally mandated pre-service and in-service training for the state's 3,500 county child welfare caseworkers and administrators.

* Training and technical support for staff who help foster children live on their own after they reach adulthood. "Every year," Sites noted, "thousands of children who have lived with substitute families or group homes become 18 years of age and find themselves suddenly facing adult independence. Without support much like the support other children receive in their biological homes as they enter college, begin careers or start families, there are great risks for bad outcomes."

* Training for staff in the use of a management information system. "Under federal requirements, each state is required to have a sophisticated, integrated, management information system in place state-wide," Sites said. "We will be providing the training required by these thousands of workers to operate that system efficiently."

According to Sites, integrating these programs will lead to greater cost-effectiveness and more consistent training of child welfare caseworkers, and it may yield research breakthroughs. "One cannot identify a field with greater need or more unanswered questions than child welfare," Sites said.

New social work Dean Larry Davis noted that Sites has been the PI on "at least one significant child welfare project every year since 1971."

Less seriously, Davis pointed out that he has been a dean here for just 20 days, and already the school has been granted $20 million. "That's a million dollars a day," Davis said.

"And now you've got to maintain that pace," Chancellor Nordenberg joked.

— Bruce Steele