/ Eighth Annual Symposium
on Fairness and Equity Issues
in Child Welfare Training and Education

June 15, 2010

University of California, Berkeley | The International House

PDSAs: Orange County / ERDD Training
Title / ERDD “Brief” Training –Awareness. ERDD Training for all CFS Supervisors to teach the 1 Page ERDD “Brief” document of RD &D statistics specific to this county to supervisors. They will, in turn, teach the document to their staff with an initial goal of “increasing their awareness” of these disparate statistics.
Jurisdiction / Orange County Social Service Agency
What are you trying to accomplish? / To heighten awareness about racial disparity and disproportionality in this agency. Further, to do so to a point that the staff who are trained are considering fairness and equity in their practice.
How will you know a change is an improvement?* / Supervisors will self report an understanding of RDD in this county, and not only be able to share this information with their staff, but also indicate a willingness to consider this information in carrying out their job duties at this agency.
What strategy can you test to result in improvement? / Educate the supervisors in CFS about the information on the Orange County 1 Page ERDD “Brief” statistics document (which contains information about our racial disparity and proportionality stats) to a point where they can, in turn, teach the information to their line staff to increase their awareness of RD and D.
Key element / K3
Impact on Disproportionality / This educational process will heighten the awareness of the supervisors and their staff to give them a starting point to be able to begin to work on Eliminating Racial Disparity and Disproportionality within our system.
PDSA Cycle# / 4
Plan: Overview / Supervisors will be given education and experiences with the disparity and disproportionality facts and concepts.
They will be given the tools they need to be able to teach the RD and D facts (stats) to their staff.
Supervisors and their staff will be encouraged to use the ERDD information and their heightened awareness of these facts in their practice.
Plan: Who / Multiple trainers from both Career Development and from an ERDD committee who are familiar with the ERDD concepts and statistics will conduct the class. All CFS supervisors will be trained.
Plan: Hypothesis / Heightened awareness about RDD will help social workers and supervisors consider fairness and equity when they perform their job duties, thus contributing to ERDD.
Plan: Key Questions / Outcomes of this training will support the process of ERDD.
Supervisors will self report an increased awareness of the principals of RDD, considering these factors in their practice. If the supervisors have heightened awareness, they will be able to teach these concepts to their staff and utilize what they learned while performing their job duties.
Do / A training was conducted to teach all CFS supervisors to be able to deliver statistics on Racial Disparity and Disproportionality specific to the County of Orange.
A training evaluation was completed by each supervisor participant immediately following the training. On a scale of 1-5, 5 indicating “Strongly Agree” to a rating of 1, indicating “Strongly Disagree”, 84% of the participants indicated that they agree or strongly agree that they would consider bias and cultural sensitivity (a rating of 4 or 5) when performing their job duties as a result of the information they were provided on ERDD in this SDM class. 14% indicated the rating of 3 or neutral and 2% disagreed and scored a rating of 2 or 1.
After the supervisors had trained their workers, approximately 60 days after the initial supervisor training, data was gathered in the form of an evaluation/self report. On a 5 point scale, a rating of 5 indicating “Not Likely” to a rating of 1, indicating “Very Likely”, 62% of supervisors indicated they would be likely or very likely to continue to use information learned in processing the1 page ERDD “brief” in future conversations with their staff on fairness and equity. Another 30% rated this scale a 3 or neutral and No (0) supervisors chose a rating of 1 or 2, indicating disagreement with the measure.
Study / We expected the training to increase the supervisors and, in turn, their workers’ awareness of racial disparity and disproportionality.
Act / We will continue to provide training to SSA staff on RD
D to improve our ability to reach our goal of ERDD.
Ready for Spread and sustainability / Yes.

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