Michigan’s accredited schools of social work are working with the state Department of Human Services to come up with a bachelor’s program for degree-holders to specialize in child welfare cases. Eastern Michigan University is one of 22 accredited schools in Michigan.
To get the certification, graduates will have training to go through that will help them better handle cases dealing with foster care, adoption and Child Protective Services.
“The name for this training program has not been set in stone and will vary according to the university,” said Ann Alvarez, the director of the school of social work at EMU. “Some people might call it a certificate, some people might call it a specialization. The language is still under development.”
Elizabeth Schuster, professor and director of the bachelor’s of social work program at EMU, has been meeting with people from around the state to proceed with this plan.
Schuster said plans are still in the “very preliminary stages of determining
how this is going to be implemented at Eastern,” and placed an emphasis on the fact that this is still a work in progress.
While it is not clear how people will be chosen to be part of the training or what it will consist of, Alvarez believes there will be classes in child welfare and real-life experience in the child welfare field.
Schuster does not think there will have to be many curriculum changes, as Eastern already offers the courses and internships that will be required in the training.
“We are pretty well set up,” she said. “We’re not going to have to create any new courses in order to do that.”
When asked how soon this program would be up-and-running at Eastern, Schuster said she doesn’t know for sure, but she is hoping for something to happen soon.
“Best-case scenario, I would hope that we’d be able to implement something like this a year from now,” she said. “But again, there are a lot of pieces of this program that have yet to be determined how it’s going to happen at Eastern.”
Enrollment is high in EMU’s social work program. Alvarez has noticed a trend of enrollment in the social work program increasing during poorer economic times. She thinks this is because people are more aware of things like poverty and unemployment. However, there is no way to know for sure how successful this program will be.
Schuster said the state of Michigan, the DHS, and other child welfare agencies will “look fondly upon students that have had this training who actually want to work in that area of social work.”
“We’re happy that we will be able to provide this opportunity to the students, and we do feel like the students will benefit from this training at the university,” Schuster said. “It would mean less training on the state level.”
Alvarez is hoping people will become more qualified after going through this training and fill the positions to work on child welfare cases, since not all social workers have degrees in social work.
“We’re excited about the opportunity because we think it will be a terrific way for more of our students to be able to move into these positions that are very important,” Alvarez said.
