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School Social Work Now!
Supporting Innovative Practice, Effective
Leadership & Applied Research
December 2011 - Vol 2, Issue 12 |
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Greetings! |
Are you looking for interventions to use for your school's PBIS initiative? ACSSW has the link for you! Aaron Kittredge, a school social worker in Michigan, has launched a website that is overflowing with ideas and interventions. PBISWorld.Com not only provides strategies but tracking forms as well. You'll want to bookmark this site. The National School Boards Association Center for Public Education recently released a report on parental involvement in education. This report contains some helpful tips for schools to engage parents. Parent Involvement. A request: In response to a member's quest for practice evaluation tools, ACSSW will be posting samples of rubrics and school social work performance evaluations on the website under "Practice." It is expected the first group of documents will be up by Saturday. If you have an evaluation sample that you believe could assist other school social workers, please send to Judie Shine for posting. A reminder to Submit Your Proposal for the 3rd National ACSSW Research to Practice Summit, June 24-26, 2012, in Bloomingdale, IL. This is an opportunity to contribute to the professional development of colleagues across the nation. Deadline is December 10, 2011.
Visit the ACSSW website to learn more about the upcoming ACSSW School Social Work Conference in New Orleans, January 30-31, 2012. Enjoy the sights of this fantastic city while strengthening your skills and knowledge base. Hurry! Register on-line or download a form from the website. Teams of 3 or more from a district receive a discount. Don't delay!! Judith Kullas Shine President |
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Professional Development Opportunities |
It's Fall!! And that means it's time to take advantage of one or more of the many professional growth opportunities across the country. This link includes state, national and international professional development opportunities. New events are added several times a month. If you represent an organization with PDOs of interest to school social workers, please contact ACSSW with details. All submissions will be considered for posting based upon relevance, timing, and interest level.
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Recommended Read for December | |
The School Practitioner's Concise Companion to Mental Health
by Cynthia Franklin, Mary Beth Harris and Paula Allen-Meares
Reviews at Oxford University Press
"Here, readers will find an overview of adolescent mental health disorders and step-by-step guidelines for intervening effectively. This Concise Companion covers ten major mental health issues-from depression to ADHD to autism-as well as strategies for working with co-occurring disorders and managing psychopharmacological treatments.
Each chapter is filled with charts, checklists, and cases and is conveniently organized around What We Know, What We Can Do, Tools and Practice Examples, and Key Points to Remember. A portable catalog of best practices, it brings evidence-based practice within easy reach of school professionals.
Features:
- Brings out one focused section from the acclaimed School Services Sourcebook
- An affordable resource for cash- and time-strapped school-based professionals
- Features the best of the Sourcebook but in a smaller size so people who only need a little of the information don't have to buy the whole thing"
OUP-Franklin MH Better World Books - Franklin MH |
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Practice Points |  Abstract: Bullying attitudes and behaviors and perceptions of peers were assessed in a case study experiment employing a social norms intervention in five diverse public middle schools in the State of New Jersey (Grades 6 to 8). . . In the baseline survey, students substantially misperceived peer norms regarding bullying perpetration and support for probullying attitudes. As predicted by social norms theory, they thought bullying perpetration, victimization, and probullying attitudes were far more frequent than was the case. Also as predicted, variation in perceptions of the peer norm for bullying was significantly associated with personal bullying perpetration and attitudes. . . Results suggest that a social norms intervention may be a promising strategy to help reduce bullying in secondary school populations. Read the details in the full report. Click here to download. Experts report that although individuals often turn to counseling during times of crisis or depression, not enough training has been focused on suicide prevention. Often the counselor or therapist makes assumptions that are wrong. Often the question about suicidal ideation is not brought up early enough in the therapeutic relationship. This article suggests ways and guidelines on raising and discussing the issue with persons seeking help. Read the complete article. Maurice Elias, Rutgers University professor and director of the school's Social-Emotional Learning Lab, recommends an approach used at one New Jersey middle school that worked to increase students' classroom participation by fostering a safe school environment. The gradual approach includes efforts to create relationship-centered classrooms and reduce bullying and student intimidation. Learn more. A new report from the Brookings Institution analyzes metropolitan trends on concentrated poverty in urban areas since 2000, finding that "after substantial progress against concentrated poverty during the booming economy of the late 1990s, the economically turbulent 2000s saw much of those gains erased." In general, the report found that the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods -- where at least 40 percent of individuals live below the poverty line -- rose by one-third from 2000 to 2005-09. Concentrated poverty nearly doubled in Midwestern metro areas from 2000 to 2005-09, and rose by one-third in Southern metro areas. The population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods rose more than twice as fast in suburbs as in cities from 2000 to 2005-09. Compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005-09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance. However, black residents continued to comprise the largest share of the population in these neighborhoods (45 percent), and over two-thirds of residents had a high school diploma or less. The authors observe that the strong economy of the late 1990s did not permanently resolve the challenge of concentrated poverty, and therefore recommend policies that foster balanced and sustainable economic growth at the regional level and that forge connections between growing clusters of low-income neighborhoods and regional economic opportunity. Read article. Download full report. |
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Leadership News | 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), released the report Understanding Evidence, Part 1: Best Available Research Evidence, which aims to explain the purpose and meaning of the Continuum of Evidence of Effectiveness. This tool that was developed to facilitate a common understanding of what the best available research evidence means in the field of violence prevention. Specifically it intends to enable researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers to determine whether or not a prevention program, practice, or policy is actually achieving the outcomes it aims to and in the way it intends. Review full report.
For School Social Workers: Redefining Social Work in Education
"For decades, the role of social work in schools has been fulfilled by skilled clinicians assigned to counsel a caseload of students with behavioral or mental health issues and to aid in compliance for students with special education needs. While this role for social work clinicians continues to be important, recent research and urban education reforms have redefined the connection between social work and education. . . Simultaneously, recent education reform efforts have brought forth the creation of many new schools-charter schools-independently operating outside of the traditional urban school models. While there is earnest debate about the propriety or effectiveness of charter schools in urban districts, they have nonetheless claimed a presence in the current landscape of urban education. Despite criticism, some of these new schools are turning towards social work as they invest more resources in promoting social-emotional well-being and sustained community partnerships. In many cases, this investment in social work support appropriately departs from the traditional model by commissioning workers to bring their unique training directly to school leadership teams." Read more. |
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Research Highlights |  Shifting Boundaries: Final Report on an Experimental Evaluation of a Youth Dating Violence Prevention Program in New York City Middle Schools
A new NIJ-funded study has found that school-level interventions reduced dating violence among middle school students by up to 50 percent. The multi-level, randomized control trial studied the effectiveness of school-level and classroom-level interventions, as well as a combination of the two, in reducing dating violence and sexual harassment in 30 public middle schools in New York City.
"The success of school-level interventions is particularly important because they can be implemented with very few extra costs to schools," said John H. Laub, director of the National Institute of Justice. "The scientific methods in this study were rigorous."
School-level interventions include using temporary school-based restraining orders, higher levels of faculty and security presence in areas identified as "hot spots," and posters to increase awareness and encourage reporting of incidents to school officials. Access full report here.
Study Links Academic Setbacks to Middle School Transition
In the past policymakers and researchers have emphasized the importance of improving students' transition into high school. However, a new study of Florida schools, utilizing the state's longitudinal database to track more than 450,000 students in the state's public schools, suggests the critical transition problem may happen when students first enter middle school. A study conducted by Martin West and Guido Schwerdt, researchers with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich in Germany, found that students in Florida who attended elementary schools ending at grade 5, performance in mathematics and language arts dropped dramatically when they switched to middle school in 6th grade. Complete article. Read full study. |
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In the News | | Teenagers Having Sex Now a Minority
About 43 percent of unmarried teenage girls and 42 percent of unmarried teenage boys have had sexual intercourse at least once, according to new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2002, the last year such a report was published, 51.1 percent of girls and 60.4 percent of boys had had sex by 19. Data for 2006 to 2010, published last month, also show that most teenagers used contraception the first time they had sex - 78 percent of girls and 85 percent of boys, up from 75 percent of girls and 82 percent of boys in 2002. For various behavioral and biological reasons, teenagers are more susceptible than adults to acquiring certain sexually transmitted diseases, and teenage girls have higher rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea infection than any other age or sex group. Syphilis rates are lower among teenagers than in other age groups, but those rates have increased every year since the early 2000s. Gladys Martinez, the report's lead author and a demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics, pointed out some significant changes since 2002. "The percentage of teenage girls who have had sex is the same across ethnicities," she said. "This is the first time that has happened, and the leveling off is due mainly to the smaller percentages of black teenage girls who have had sex." Full article here. |
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Webinars | |
The Learning the Language/Promoting Effective Ways for Interdisciplinary Collaboration Practice Group is hosting a webinar titled, Bridging the Gap: Resources for Effective Communication and Collaboration. The free webinar will feature Michael Valenti, Ph.D. discussing how to communicate with stakeholders, improve the readability of written communication materials, and strengthen school-caregiver relationships. It will be held on December 8, 2011 at 2:00pm EST. To join the meeting click here.
Wraparound Milwaukee provides comprehensive, individualized and cost-effective care to children with mental health and emotional needs a will be hosting a free webinar on family connection. The director, Bruce Kamradt, will discuss the successes of the program using a strength-based and individualized service approach and pairing families with care-coordinators to assist in identifying resources to "wrap" those services around the youth and family. The webinar will take place Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 at 2pm EDT. To register click here. |
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Research Survey Request for Assistance | |
Bibliotherapy & School Social Workers
I am a doctoral student at Dominican University's Graduate School of Library and Information Science, River Forest, Illinois. I am seeking school social workers to complete an online survey about bibliotherapy for use towards research for a doctoral dissertation. For the purposes of this research bibliotherapy is defined as the use of books or other reading materials (poetry, magazines, comic books, etc) to assist with the counseling process. Participation is voluntary, confidential and anonymous. Completion of the survey should take approximately 30 minutes and can be done from any computer with internet access. If you are an interested social worker, or know of a school social worker who would be interested, the survey link is below. For more information, contact: Elizabeth Garcia, Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University. Thank you in advance for your participation. Bibliotherapy Survey Link. |
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Grants & Funding | |
Search Tool Helps Users Find Grants to Fund Youth Programs
The Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs has created an online Web Tool that allows users to search for federal grant opportunities by youth topic or federal agency. The tool uses a filter to search for grants that are likely to fund youth programs. To learn more and determine if you are eligible, click here.
ING Unsung Heroes Award
ING Unsung Heroes began in 1995as a way for ING to demonstrate its commitment to the education community. Grants are given to K-12 educators utilizing new teaching methods and techniques that improve learning. Each year, educators submit applications for an ING Unsung Heroes grant by describing projects they have initiated or would like to pursue. Each project is judged on its:
innovative method, creativity, and ability to positively influence the students. All K-12 education professionals, whether or not they are clients of ING, are eligible. Specifically, these individuals must be: (1) Employed by an accredited K-12 public or private school located in the United States, or (2) Full-time educators, teachers, principals, paraprofessionals, orclassified staff with effective projects that improve student learning. Deadline: April 30, 2012. Details here.
Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Invites Applications for Dissertation Fellowships in Education
The fellowships are intended to support doctoral students for work done after the successful defense of their dissertations. Although applicants must be candidates for a doctoral degree at a graduate school in the United States, they need not be U.S. citizens. Applications are encouraged from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to education, sociology, economics, psychology, statistics, and psychometrics.
The fellowship is a one-time award of up to $25,000, which may be used for a period of not less than nine months and up to eighteen months. Four fellowships will be awarded. Complete program information and the application form are available at the Cooke Foundation Web site. Deadline: February 3, 2012. Link to complete RFP.
Libri Foundation: Books for Children
TheLibri Foundation Books for Children Grants donate new, quality, hardcover children's books for small, rural, public libraries across the country. Maximum award: varies. Eligibility: Libraries should be in a rural area, have a limited operating budget, and an active children's department. The average total operating budget of a Books for Children grant recipient must be less than $40,000. Deadline: January 23, 2012. Application Guidelines. |
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ACSSW Activities | |
ACSSW's present activities include:
- increasing research projects and their application within the school environment;
- developing a national school social work role paper;
- establishing a National Center for School Social Work Practice, Leadership and Research, a long-term goal,
- hosting the first Louisiana State-wide School Social Work Conference, January 30-31, 2012, in New Orleans, LA, and
- developing the 3rd National School Social Work Research Summit to be held June 24-26, 2012, in Bloomingdale, IL (a Chicago suburb) at the Hilton Chicago/Indian Lakes Resort.
If you have interest in participating in any of these activities, contact Judie Shine. ACSSW strives to be inclusive and transparent in all of its activities and welcomes, whether lengthy or short, the participation of its members. |
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