Southeastern helps recruit foster parents
Contact: Christina Chapple
3/7/06
HAMMOND – Southeastern Louisiana University’s social work program has launched “Project Foster Homes,” a program to help the Louisiana Office of Community Services (OCS) recruit and train critically needed foster parents.
Funded by a three-year Title IV-E grant, Project Foster Homes represents an outreach program to the community as well as partnership with OCS, said Licensed Clinical Social Worker Jane Moncrief, training consultant for Southeastern’s social work program in the Department of Counseling and Human Development.
“Foster homes for children in the custody of the state are in very short supply,” Moncrief said. “The shortage will soon reach a crisis point. The number of children needing homes grows daily.”
Moncrief and Maurice Badon, social work program’s Title IV-E coordinator, are coordinating Project Foster Homes activities in OCS’s Covington Region, which includes the parishes of Tangipahoa, Livingston, St. Helena, St. Tammany and Washington.
With the theme “Our best recruiters are happy foster parents,” program activities include working with OCS to strengthen the region’s Foster Parent Associations, and devising training methods to promote a positive and productive working relationship between foster parents and state appointed foster care workers.
Moncrief said efforts are also being made to inform the public about the need for foster parents and to give clear information on the application process and expectations.
Public outreach efforts, she said, have included designing posters and commissioning an informational video that will be used to recruit new foster parents.
To produce the video, Moncrief last fall approached Southeastern communication professor Joe Burns. Burns said his broadcast communication students were admittedly hesitant about tackling the project in the midst of the hurricane-disrupted semester; however, they changed their minds once they began filming OCS personnel, social workers, foster parents and children and editing their interviews.
The video was produced by Brett Bova of Hammond, Jamie Bass of Mandeville, Chris Brown of Metairie, Nyeisha Fisher of Baton Rouge, Regina Gillam of Harvey, Kelly Smith of Chalmette and Whitney Magee of Franklinton. It uses interviews to define foster care and foster parents, address the difficulty of recruiting foster parents, illustrate what foster care is like for children and parents, and explain the application and training process.
The students, said Burns, “just hit it out of the park. They just did a wonderful job and it was a great learning experience.”
In the eight-minute video, Home Development Case Manager Jessica St. Pierre describes a foster parent as “anybody in the neighborhood -- your neighbor, your pastor, people you see at the grocery store, people you work with.”
Foster parent Rick Terrell, who described the job as both tough and rewarding, says he tells potential foster parents that they are “being a surrogate. They’re being someone who is coming in to support a child that is at risk.
“I’ve never done anything as difficult and I’ve never done anything as fulfilling,” he said.
Moncrief said a Project Foster Homes steering committee of staff, students, foster parents and state foster care staff meets regularly at Southeastern to assess needs and plan for training and other activities to meet the goals of recruiting and retaining foster parents.
For additional information about becoming a foster parent, contact the Louisiana Office of Community Services at 1-800-256-1918.
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