NASW-PA’s Testimony on House Bill 302



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Testimony on House Bill 302

House Judiciary Committee

May 9, 2007

Jenna Mehnert, MSW, Executive Director, NASW PA

Good morning Chairman Calagirone, Chairman Marsico and members of the House Judiciary Committee. I am Jenna Mehnert, the Executive Director of the PA Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW PA). The PA Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers is a membership organization representing approximately 6,100 professional social workers in PA.

The social work professional and child protective services have a long and interconnected history. The development of child protective services as a national movement was largely shaped by social work values and principles. The goal of working with family members from a strength-based perspective and provide the needed resources to address a family’s weakness in order to preserve as many families as possible comes directly from social work practice. Respecting the inherent dignity and worth for all individuals, adult or child, is also a core value of the social work profession.

NASW-PA strongly supports House Bill 302, known as the “Children in Substitute Care Act”. The bill provides basic protections to children who have been removed from their homes and placed in substitute care. NASW supports child welfare policies designed to provide the best care for all children giving them basic needs, as well as giving a sense of security when living away from familiar homes or families.

Whether practicing in county positions or for private agencies, profession social workers serve children and families throughout the entire continuum of child welfare services including child protective services, family preservation, foster care, group homes, residential facilities, adoption services and kinship care services. Social workers also work in many of the systems that work in partnership with the child welfare system such as educational and mental health systems; TANF as well as employment assistance and substance abuse treatment.

NASW PA is aware of objections that have been raised to House Bill 302. One of the objections is in regard to freedom from sexual orientation. Regardless of the discrimination clauses in state or federal laws, the National Association of Social Worker’s Code of Ethics, which is the social workers guide to profession conduct, states that “social workers should not practice, condone, facilitate or collaborate with any form of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, political beliefs, religion, or mental or physical disability”. In adherence to their professional code of ethics, social workers working in child welfare services and interacting with families and children in substitute care, may not discriminate based on a person’s sexual orientation.

Pennsylvania’s Best Practice Standards for Child Welfare practice require that caseworkers be culturally competent and culturally sensitive. To that end, the requirement that children in foster care have “the opportunity to participate in culturally appropriate extracurricular and cultural and personal enrichment activities” is completely aligned with the value of respecting each child’s unique culturally background and providing him/her with the ability to remain connected to that background. Foster care should be designed to provide children with a safe home that allows them to express their individuality while still remaining connected to their own religious and cultural background.

The National Association of Social Worker’s Code of Ethics, the Standards for Social Work Practice in Child Protection, and the Pennsylvania’s Best Practice Standards for Child Welfare all require that children in substitute care be provided many of the protections afforded to them in House Bill 302.

I would like to remind the members of this committee that while Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare Best Practice Standards call for supervisors to hold masters degrees in social worker and protective service workers to ideally hold bachelors degrees in social work, nationally less than 30% of caseworkers in child protective services are professional social workers. Many who work in child protective services have other, at times completely unrelated, educational backgrounds. Due to the various educational backgrounds of those who work in this emotional challenging and vitally important field; House Bill 302 creates a minimal floor of acceptable treatment that has long been mandated practice for professional social workers. NASW PA views HB 302 as providing the basic provisions that should be afforded to all children. It is critical that all professionals working in child welfare be held to the high standards required of professional social workers. Our children, and their families, deserve no less.

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