On any given day, roughly 20% of the children in foster care are of Hispanic or Latino descent. Research suggests that children in care do better when their biological and foster families share a common language and similar cultural backgrounds. For families who are more comfortable learning in Spanish, one of the barriers to becoming resource parents is the lack of Spanish-language training material. To address this need, FosterParentCollege.com announces the addition of 11 pre-service Spanish-language training courses to its website. These courses, which are translated versions of our English courses, are intended to be used as part of a broader pre-service training program which includes in-person meetings.
Maintenance of your agency's FosterParentCollege.com account is important. Did you know that if you maintain your member directory by reclaiming units and deactivating accounts when appropriate, you could potentially save your agency money?
To help agency staff get the most out of the FosterParentCollege.com management system, we are providing a new 30-minute webinar on Account Maintenance. We strongly encourage FPC account administrators, especially new ones, to attend this webinar to learn helpful ways to keep their accounts up to date. Topics covered include editing account information, reclaiming and reallocating training units, deactivating members' accounts, transferring members to different subgroups within the agency structure, and deleting subgroups.
Visit our
webinar page to view the upcoming webinar schedule or email Sarah Griffin, agency trainer, for more information on scheduling options.
Improve Retention During Pre-service Training: Newly published article in Child Welfare
A common problem faced by many child welfare agencies is the high attrition rate of prospective resource parents during the pre-service training process. One reason for this high attrition rate is the hardships faced by prospective foster parents who are required to take traditional classroom-only training. Factors such as the inconvenience and cost of arranging child care, time off work, and travel, often result in parents dropping out of training.
A research study published in the journal Child Welfare reports on the efficacy of a traditional classroom-only training program and Foster Parent College's blended curriculum, which combines 10 online interactive courses with 4 classroom meetings.
The study found that the blended curriculum significantly lowered the dropout rate of adults preparing to become foster parents. Additionally, at the 3-month follow-up, parents in the blended curriculum had retained more knowledge of the presented information than parents in the traditional classroom-only training. While both study groups made significant gains in awareness of parenting issues, those gains were greater for the classroom-only approach.
The article, "Efficacy of Blended Preservice Training for Resource Parents," was coauthored by Lee White, Richard Delaney, Caesar Pacifici, Carol Nelson, Josh Whitkin, Maureen Lovejoy, and Betsy Keefer Smalley. It appears in Child Welfare, Vol. 93(6), pp. 45-72.
Development of the blended curriculum was funded through a 5-year Small Business Innovation Research grant (Award R44HD054032) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health to Northwest Media, parent company of FosterParentCollege.com.
3 Easy Ways to Get Your FPC Questions Answered
Need help managing your FosterParentCollege.com account? Have a question about using the system but not sure where to turn? FosterParentCollege.com has 3 easy ways to get your questions answered:
View video or print tutorials. These tutorials are designed specifically to help agency staff and administrators with the FPC management system. Log into your administrative home page and click "Tutorials for Agencies" under the Website Training & Help tab. Or go to our
agency tutorials page.
Take one of our free weekly webinars. These webinars give an overview of our courses, introduce the FPC management system, and explain how to customize the system to fit agencies' reporting needs. Visit our
webinar page to see the schedule.
Contact our agency trainer. Sarah can answer specific questions or schedule a private webinar for your organization or agency. Contact her at Sarah@northwestmedia.com or 800-777-6636.
New Courses on the Horizon
Foster Parent College is always creating new courses or updating existing ones to provide resource parents with the information that they need to support the children in their care. We have a number of courses currently in the works which should become available this year, including:
Understanding the Birth Relationship
Advanced Parenting Workshop on Aggression
Parenting Children Who Have Been Substance Exposed
Medical Issues in Foster Care
Reasonable and Prudent Parenting
Welcome New Agencies
We extend a warm welcome to these new agencies which have recently joined
fosterparentcollege.com.
California Family Life CenterSan Jacinto, CA
Central Missouri Foster Care & Adoption Association Jefferson City, MO
Children & Families FirstWilmington, DE
EWU Family Resource and Training CenterCoeur d'Alene, ID
Futuro Infantil Hispano Foster Family AgencyWest Covina, CA
Glenn County Health & Human ServicesWillows, CA
Kunuwanimano Child & Family ServicesOntario, Canada
McKean County Children and Youth ServicesSmethport, PA
Northern Virginia Family ServiceOakton, VA
On The Rise Inc.Barstow, CA
Redwood Community ServicesUkiah, CA
San Diego Center for ChildrenSan Diego, CA
Texas Family InitiativeDenton, TX
TFI Family ConnectionsTulsa, OK
TFI Family ServicesKearney, NE
TFI Family ServicesTopeka, KS
If your agency would like a customized flier to send to parents or agency staff, please contact Liz at Liz@northwestmedia.com or 800-777-6636.