We will use this blog to discuss course topics with each other. We will also use it to inform each other about social work evaluation in our different countries, by posting the answers for the questions in the first assignment.
Here is the assignment:
“Getting to know your agency” report on Our Blog (25%): This assignment is geared toward helping the student/student group become acquainted with the agency with which they are working (internship or employment) and then sharing the information with the class in the US and Lithuania so you become familiar with agencies in the US and in Lithuania. If a student is not currently in an agency, the student should join his/her group members in working with the agency associated with the group’s interest and advanced focus of study. You will learn and describe the following in your paper:
- the agency’s mission,
- the types of services provided,
- the way services are evaluated,
- research that is carried out about services, and
- how the agency is funded,
- Your thoughts about the posts of other students.
Substance Abuse Treatment for Women and Children:
ReplyDeleteThe Women's Treatment Center
Chicago, IL.
AGENCY MISSION: The mission of The Women's Treatment Center is to provide women with a continuum of care, recovery tools, and parenting skills to maintain a sober lifestyle as they rebuild their lives and mend the bonds with their families
The scope of this treatment includes social services, medical care and mental health services, which are offered without regard to race, creed, color, sexual orientation, disability, national origin or ability to pay.
The Women's Treatment Center is designed to provide a variety of treatment services to women, eliminating the common barriers they typically face. It is one of the few substance abuse programs in the nation that can accommodate children in residential treatment, making TWTC particularly responsive to the needs of chemically dependent mothers.
I am honored to be a part of a facility that practices a one-stop model. This one-stop model gives women and their children to feel safe and be able to get the treatment without leaving the building where vulnerability is at its peak. I currently work with women and their children on a residential unit. The program asks for the women to abstain for 90-days. However, patients do have the right to leave the treatment center at anytime unless they are mandated.
The majority (approx. 85%) of funds come from the state of Illinois and the rest miscellaneously (proprietors and private donations). There is not much research going on with the agency however, gathering from staff meetings, almost all of the staff members are eager to explore and mold a new treatment approach.
Ijigu, Melat
ReplyDeleteTillman, Tara
Wheeler, Bethany
Introduction to Agency:
Today, the Mental health Courts and the Drug Courts have shown positive results in reducing recidivism rates, and operate at the fraction of a cost of incarceration, Illinois has not demonstrated a financial commitment to fund the programs. One of the mental health and drug court programs is Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC). This program provides a mix of supervision, treatment, and sanctions and rewards, involving close collaboration with community treatment programs.
Treatment for individuals may contribute to a better quality of life for mentally ill non-violent drug offenders. We will focus on types of services they provide, the way their services are evaluated, how they are funded, and their treatment approaches that will be used for individuals with substance abuse and mental illness that are incarcerated. We will also continue to analyze the agency’s mission on the importance of treatment, the different programs that are available to support these individuals, and ways the agency suggests limiting habitual relapse into crime.
Agency’s mission and vision:
TASC offers life-changing opportunities for people whose substance abuse or mental health problems have put them at risk for chronic involvement with the justice system. They place people into rehabilitative programs across Illinois and provide monitoring and recovery support for sustained success. Through direct services and public policy, we advocate for effective and cost-saving solutions that allow individuals, families, and communities to thrive. They envision a healthy and just society where people and communities are empowered to overcome and prevent addiction, mental health problems, and criminal behavior.
Services Provided:
TASC provides many different services throughout the state of Illinois. TASC works with state administrative bodies, community based agencies, and public systems. The services primarily target individuals with a substance abuse or dependence disorder as well as a mental health disorder who become involved with the criminal justice system. Many services include recovery case management services, advocacy, and assessment. Services and programs target both adult men and women in addition to youth. There are 5 different groupings of services including Adult Court & Probation, Juvenile Court & Probation, Corrections & Community Reentry, Health Services and Child Welfare & Family.
TASC provides various services to the Adult Court & Probation programs which include Adult Criminal Justice Services (ACJS), Access to Recovery, Drug Courts, Driving Under the Influence Program, Integrated Multiphase Program of Assessment and Comprehensive Treatment (IMPACT), Cook County Mental Health Court, State’s Attorney’s Drug Abuse Program (SADAP), and Women Returning Home (WRH). The Adult Criminal Justice Services (ACJS) program offers individuals the opportunity to receive substance abuse and mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration in prison for nonviolent offenders. TASC provides case management services to develop individualized care plans and toxicology screenings for individuals involved in ACJS.
TASC also provides clinical case management for individuals diagnosed with a chronic mental illness and a co-occurring substance abuse/dependence disorder who are re-entering the community after navigating the Cook County Mental Health Court system. TASC is also involved with the planning process and expanding the services provided within the Cook County Mental Health Court system. TASC provides case management services for the Women Returning Home program aimed at linking women to substance abuse treatment, healthcare and social services who are at-risk for contracting HIV/AIDS.
ReplyDeleteTASC provides assessment and referrals for treatment for the following programs: Access to Recovery, a program to help make treatment more available for substance-dependent people on probation; Driving Under the Influence Program, TASC also provides recommendations for treatment in the court settings; IMPACT, a project within the Cook County Department of Corrections that provides educational, vocational, mental health, HIV-related, social and health services to individuals who are being detained in incarcerated at the Cook County Jail; and SADAP, a program for first-time drug offenders.
TASC also provides various services to the Juvenile Court & Probation programs which include Juvenile Justice Services (JJS), Juvenile Drug Court Program (JCDP), Juvenile Evening Reporting Center (ERC), Detention Home Expansion Project (DHEP), and Youth Enrichment Services (YES). TASC provides assessments, toxicology tests and substance abuse referral/case management services to Juvenile Justice Services, Juvenile Court Drug Program, and the Detention Home Expansion Project. The Juvenile Evening Reporting Center program is a type of diversion program that targets at-risk youth in hopes of deterring them from substance abuse and other potentially destructive behaviors. The Youth Enrichment Services program is designed for youth who lack interpersonal and social skills. The program’s aim is to teach youth the necessary skills to lead a productive life. Education is focused on social and vocational skills, self-esteem, peer pressure, HIV/AIDS, pregnancy prevention and violence prevention.
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ReplyDeleteAnother study was published in 2006, evaluating early outcomes of TASC’s Cook County Mental Health Court program. This study tracked program participants’ number of arrests, days incarcerated, and incarceration costs before and after admission to the program. Results focused on the reduction differences in these three areas, after admission and participation in the Cook County Mental Health Court program.
ReplyDeleteA final study, conducted in 2009, compared TASC’s clients ability to successfully complete treatment with others in treatment in Illinois. This study simply compared the numbers of clients successfully completing treatment programs, showing that two thirds of TASC’s clients completed, as opposed to only one third completing in all other treatments in Illinois.
Conclusion
TASC provides a wide variety of services to men, women and youth throughout the state of Illinois. The programming that TASC offers holistically approaches the recovery process. TASC not only provides substance abuse treatment, but also addresses other aspects that influence a person to become substance users. TASC provides motivation and support for clients in the recovery process in addition to linking them with necessary services including job training, housing, mental health treatment, and education, to name a few.
By providing therapeutic services and drug and medical treatment, drug-offenders will overcome their drug addictions and lower their chances of re-arrest. Non-violent drug offenders display a pattern of entrenched recidivism when their addictions go untreated. TASC program provides screening, assessment, treatment planning, monitoring, urinalysis, and court liaison functions. The program refers a client to a community-based treatment program, monitors the client’s progress and compliance, and reports results back to the referring criminal justice agency. TASC programs can help alleviate prison crowding through diversion to treatment, when it is considered through careful screening and assessment to be the most appropriate course of action for the offender.
TASC offers defendants a way to avoid jail while working to address the underlying problem of substance abuse and mental illness. One of the benefits of TASC for offenders who successfully complete the program is the felony charges will either be downgraded to a misdemeanor or dismissed altogether.
Getting to Know Your Agency
ReplyDeleteBy Megan Anenen, Mollie Eliasof, Miri Hallali, & Ninfa Uribe
In the public school system, there are often individuals who require extra assistance from school faculty and programs to learn and thrive. In some instances, individuals have needs that cannot be met through the public school system alone and require the assistance of outside programs. Our group’s focus for this assignment aims to explore the programs offered by Chicago’s public school system as well as popular programs meant to address the needs of children in both the US and Lithuania. We will discuss the Chicago Public School System, a Therapeutic Day School offered through Jewish Child and Family Services, as well as a Children’s Telephone program offered in Lithuania.
Chicago Public Schools
Office of Specialized Services & Office of Special Education and Supports
Chicago Public Schools is a school system in the city of Chicago, Illinois that educates all children from ages 3-18 in a public school setting. This system is based within Chicago city limits only. Most schools are residential, meaning that the population that attends a particular school is required to live within certain boundaries surrounding each school. Chicago Public Schools employs social workers that are hired in two ways. Social workers can by hired by the Board of Education and placed at a particular school or schools and social workers can also be hired by an individual school that uses budget monies to pay the salary of the social worker that comes in to provide services for the students. The majority of the case load that social workers encounter is the special education populations that have IEPs (individualized education program).
Our Mission: The mission of the Office of Special Education and Supports (OSES) is to work collaboratively with schools, students, parents and other external stakeholders to provide the tools, guidance, supports and services necessary to ensure the success of all students with disabilities.
Vision: OSES will be a leader in effective special education practices and valued
partner for schools, parents, students and community agencies.
Values
ReplyDeleteWe believe: All students belong
We believe in:
• High Expectations
• Integrity
• Diversity
• Open Communications
• Accountability
Programs & Services
The Office of Special Education and Supports offers a variety of programs and services to all children. Information about programs, services and references are included in the OSES procedural manual. The manual includes: Interventions process, referral and evaluation, IEP overview, explanation of processes forms and more.
Below is an example of two major programs offered to the public school’s population.
1. A school-based program service intervention process
2. Parent and educator partnership
A school-based program service intervention process
School-based problem solving (SBPS) is the intervention process that is a required component of the Corey H. Settlement Agreement (1997). This agreement requires that the Chicago Public Schools implement a school-based intervention process. This process must be implemented at each elementary school.
Goals
The SBPS process is not a single event, but a process that is built into the CPS educational program. Activities are conducted in the classroom by staff working in the problem-solving delivery system. These activities include:
• Assessing student performance using classroom-based materials
• Establishing and deliver intervention in the classroom
• Translating effective teaching strategies into the regular instruction program
• Consulting to guide the "fine tuning" of classroom strategies
• Involving teachers, parents, and key personnel in collaborative decision making
The school- based problem solving is a process that involves many professionals, programs and
Services.
Social Work Services
ReplyDeleteSocial workers are assigned to each school to facilitate provision of counseling services using individual, family and group methodologies; help students develop coping strategies; increase self-esteem and improve interactive skills; facilitate environmental changes to support the implementation of appropriate educational services; and provide consultation services to faculty, parents and others, regarding socio-cultural and emotional factors.
The main focus for school social workers are students that are in special education programs within the school. These students can be referred by teachers or by parents. Before a child is placed in special education program, a problem must be presented. Students who are below their grade level in academics or those who display behavioral or emotional problems that affect their learning or the learning of others in a classroom are of concern. Before children are put in special education programs a process known as RTI (Response to Intervention) is implemented. According to Kelly (2008), RTI is intended to be an early-intervention approach to help remove barriers to learning for students before they are referred for traditional special education assessment and services. Only 31 U.S. states have a state certification process for school social workers working in a school, and many states don’t require master’s-level training for school social workers to work in a school. Internationally, of the 40 countries that have school social work, only Finland and China require a Master of Social Work (MSW) to practice in a school. (p. 7, 2008)
Once a child is placed into special education, it is determined what type of specialized services is needed. If social work services are needed for the student, they are assigned a plan that requires a minimum number of minutes a week that the student is to meet with the social worker. A Chicago School Social Worker is required to document the minutes and notes in order to be in compliance with the IEP and special education regulations
Benefit Through the SBPS process, schools are able to provide preventive, intervention services to students to address their academic/behavioral needs. SBPS is built on the belief that every child is capable of learning and that support should be available to both the student and teacher in strengthening specific curriculum areas and directly aligning instructional materials with expected outcomes.
This is a process that is based upon the elements of effective problem solving. It utilizes curriculum-based assessment, behavior observation, functional analysis of behavior and student progress monitoring as tools in the process.
ReplyDeleteParent and educator partnership-PEP (Support for Parents)
CPS offers support for parents of students with disabilities to address questions and concerns regarding your child's Individualized Education Program (IEP). In partnership with local school district personnel, the Parent and Educator Partnership (PEP) Program empowers and supports both educators and parents of children with disabilities to effectively navigate the educational system. The PEP Program provides an array of workshop and conferences also open to educators and parents of students with disabilities.
Goals - Our goal is to enhance caregivers' ability to participate actively in their child's education. It is believed that such participation will help ensure that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.
Funding
Chicago Public Schools and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) co-sponsor the PEP Program and collaborate with community organizations to establish and ensure appropriate services for students with disabilities.
Jewish Child and Family Services
ReplyDeleteJewish Child and Family Services’ mission as a whole is to provide help, healing, and caring services to strengthen lives in the community. One of their programs, the JCFS Therapeutic Day School, aims to meet this goal by providing an atmosphere designed to meet the needs of students with behavioral and emotional disorders and help alleviate these behaviors.
The services specifically offered by the JCFS Therapeutic Day School are individual and group therapy as well as individual and group special education services. The program offers a wide variety of education and behavioral specialists and a low student to teacher ratio that allows for Individualized Education Plans (IEPs).
IEPs are learning plans that are tailored to meet the individual needs of children. Parents, educators, social workers, and students can work together to create an individualized plan for learning that includes special support that the child may need and goals that they set throughout the year in terms of their education. However, IEPs are just one of the ways that the JCFS Therapeutic Day School evaluates its services and ability to assist students in meeting their predetermined goals.
Outcome evaluations are another way that the JCFS Therapeutic Day School evaluates its services. To be completed by students and their clinicians, these forms provide a well rounded look at the effectiveness of services by exploring student’s hobbies, involvement in extra curricular activities, jobs, social behavior, performance in academics, self-esteem and beliefs about themselves. By gaining feedback from both student and clinician through these evaluations, the program is better able to determine effectiveness of services.
In efforts to further evaluate their services, JCFS gathers the information from the outcome measures and the IEPs to create a statistical overview, which becomes accessible agency wide. As a result, two important documents develop from this internal form of research, the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Report and the Utilization Review (UR).
ReplyDeleteThe CQI Report provides an overall review of four of the program’s main components: personnel turnover, incident reporting, client satisfaction and evaluation, and the Utilization Review. In order to evaluate employee satisfaction and gauge the amount of change the students are experiencing in their relationships and support systems, the CQI Report not only monitors employee turnover, but also notes the amount of new hires. Under incident reporting, the CQI Report studies how often physical restraints were used and how often time outs and suspensions were distributed. The client satisfaction compares past and present responses of parents and their children in their Client Satisfaction Surveys. Lastly, the UR looks at a small, random selection of individual cases, in order to track the clinicians’ compliance with the documentation requirements. To continually progress and improve its services, JCFS Therapeutic Day School has also developed the CQI Committee, which contains one representative from every discipline within the program. The committee continuously meets to review the CQI Report and find ways to implement change in areas of the program that need improvement.
The primary source of funding for JCFS Therapeutic Day School is from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). For each student that CPS sends to JCFS Therapeutic Day School, it pays the program approximately forty thousand dollars to provide a comprehensive education for students who need more attention than public schools can offer. Since around eighty-five percent of the seats at JCFS Therapeutic Day School are filled by students that CPS sponsors, CPS is the main source of the program’s funding. The remainder of the revenue comes from the suburban districts.
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