That foster parent license comes with expectations: that you care about children and want to make a difference in their lives, can provide stability and a loving environment for youth placed in your home, and complete 30 hours of training every three years.
Let’s repeat that third thing: Virginia requires foster parents to complete 30 hours of training - that’s 10 hours each year- every three years.
It sounds totally doable. Fairfax County’s Foster Care & Adoption program offers a full slate of trainings to make hitting that goal easy. Parents can get their hours through required classes like Reflections (nine consecutive weeks of classes designed for foster and kin parents to learn how to help their children regulate emotions, feel connected and build strengths) and Pride Discipline (three weeks of a variety of techniques that help protect, nurture and meet the developmental needs of children), or electives like Foster to Adopt and Loss and Grief. This year trainings on normalcy, sexual abuse and human trafficking were also among the offerings.
So why is getting parents into trainings so difficult? An entire Reflections series in the spring had to be rescheduled for low signups. As this issue of Foster Family News was being put to bed, the rescheduled spring Reflections - moved to July and August - was in question, also due to low registration.
Reasons vary, according to Amanda Macaulay, Resource and Support supervisor in the Foster Care & Adoption program.
Make topics compelling.
“We continuously don’t get signups for Loss and Grief,” Macaulay said. “It can be a really heavy subject. Some parents don’t want to sit in a room and talk about their experience. Or they don’t want to be traumatized by other people’s stories. But we had good turnout for IEP training.” This leads Macaulay to believe that as long as topics provide tangible information parents can take home and apply, they will show up for the training.
Offer a variety of topics.
In addition to adding sexual abuse and human trafficking trainings this year, Fairfax County foster parents also can take supplemental trainings online through Foster Parent College. And there’s a mental health first aid training offered by the Community Services Board. “Our families can take that for free and send us the certificate and they get training credit,” Macaulay said. “I want my workers to be training experts. If we don’t offer the training, we need to find out who does.”
Let young people talk.
“Youth came to talk at one of our normalcy trainings,” Macaulay said. “Parents really love when the youth speak.”
Get foster parent input.
Macaulay believe the program doesn’t do a great job following up with families. “Is childcare an issue? Is the time of the class not good? Were the trainers good at presenting the information? Was the room comfortable? The location?” Macaulay asks. These are questions parents should be asked. “With Reflections there is a a post-test to see how well parents have been doing with what they learned in the class, but we haven’t been able to develop anything like that for a lot of the trainings.”
Break the barriers between silos.
“All of the Foster Care & Adoption program doesn’t know what trainings are being offered. We need to do a better job of communicating with the whole program,” Macaulay said. This way, all teams and specialists can suggest trainings to their families.
Launch a registration system.
An online registration portal where families can see offered trainings far in advance and self-register is in the works.
Promote like crazy.
Macaulay’s goal is to have her team be more proactive about promoting trainings. That includes sending out a save the date, a flier eight weeks before the training starts and reminders every two weeks. “When trainers reach out early and follow up regularly, outcomes are better when it comes to attendance,” she said.
This article posting is part of the Foster Family News monthly newsletter designed to keep foster parents informed about all the new and notable happenings in Fairfax County.
Learn about what the Foster Care & Adoption program has planned for foster families - stay on top of trends, participate in trainings and learn about policy changes.