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MAY, 2004
From the Executive Director
Robert Schachter
Amplifying the Voices of School Social Workers
This issue of Currents marks the fourth time since September that the Chapter has published a special issue reflecting the contributions of social workers in a service delivery system. By now focusing on school social work, we are highlighting an area of critical importance, as it reflects the quality of education to almost all of our City's children.
Editor, Dr. Pier Rogers, has brought together into one issue, the voices of several school social workers. The goal is to convey what members of our profession are doing that contributes, not only to the goals of the institutions that employ them, but to the very well being of the people they serve.
In addition to the articles in this issue, the results of a focus group are presented. We in the profession are all too often moving along in our work so rapidly that we don't take the time to come to more fully appreciate what our colleagues are doing. By organizing focus groups, we have a mechanism for coming to understand the numerous ways our colleagues are providing services. If we can deepen our understanding, then we can begin to convey this understanding beyond our own ranks.
What is fascinating about this is that the work is often quite dramatic. As the stories in the focus group article show, school social workers are tackling the most difficult problems that are being thrown at the school system. All too often we hear about failure, but if the findings of the focus group can be generalized at all, we have reason to believe that social workers are able to succeed, in small steps, even in the face of intractable problems.
School social workers number approximately 1,200 in the NYC public schools, making the Department of Education one of the largest NYC employers of professional social workers, if not the largest. They are also probably the highest paid direct service social workers employed within an organizational setting. Yet school social workers often work in isolation from other social workers, and there is little organizational support, including supervision.
Because of all of this, Dr. Rogers and I looked to our social work colleagues at the United Federation of Teachers to collaborate with us in putting the issue together. The UFT's School Social Work and School Psychology Chapter, led by its Chair, Ira Kurland, has been instrumental in providing support to school social workers and to advocating for maintaining, and expanding, social work's presence.
We were also pleased to have the opportunity to interview the UFT's president, Randi Weingarten, for this issue. It was our goal to develop a closer relationship with her, Ira and the UFT through this effort. What I think has actually happened exceeds our expectations. We now have an opportunity for a close collaboration to advocate together for the enhanced utilization of school social workers, and for an increase in their numbers, based on the content of articles in this newsletter.
We could have taken a different approach to this issue. It was within possibility that we could have included the contributions of social workers who are employed by agencies in communities that also provide services to school children. A good deal of innovative work is being done from these venues, and the Department of Education is frequently contracting out for services with such organizations.
The decision was made, however, to limit the focus to “in-house” social workers who are part of the system, whose utility has been under-appreciated for many years. The value of their work needs greater recognition.
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