The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) was created by Congress in 2000 as part of the Children’s Health Act to “raise the standard of care and increase access to services for children and families who experience or witness traumatic events.” This unique network of frontline providers, family members, researchers, and national partners is committed to changing the course of children’s lives by improving their care and moving scientific gains quickly into practice across the U.S. By taking part in Benchmarks’ Standardized Assessment Protocol (SAP) project, the Cabarrus County DSS administrative social work staff was trained in trauma-informed care via National Child Traumatic Stress Network’s “Trauma Training for the Child Welfare Professional” this November.
The purpose of this training is to support caseworkers, supervisors, and all levels of the child welfare workforce in implementing trauma-informed knowledge and skills in their daily interactions, professional services, and organizational culture. This entails onboarding facilitators within the DSS, who will then manage the annual NCTSN training of their staff. Cabarrus’ leadership has started using what they learned during trauma training before they completed all their training hours. Cabarrus County Program Administrator of Child Welfare Services, Sharon Schueneman, developing an internal policy and debriefing process for cases involving child deaths or other traumatic events. This will be used to identify secondary trauma and help social work staff to work through any effects of secondary traumatic stress.
Now that training with the administration team has been completed, Cabarrus DSS has identified their next steps using the skills and knowledge they gained. Their plan includes using training videos they viewed as resources for their social workers who are going through pre-service training and refresher training. They have discussed expanding on the video teachings post-trauma training to teach and hone workers’ active listening skills. They also mentioned using training examples for discussions on how to overcome barriers to partnership. One of the ways that they have identified that that they would like to overcome partnership barriers with other agencies, systems, or children and families, is to continue to invite those with lived experience to participate in discussions and using their suggestions for improving local agency processes that directly affect children and families. DSS has already done this in one instance in which a parent with lived experience helped their Prevention Team to assess changes to a screening tool used for parents and caregivers who experience substance use issues.
Leadership advised that they like to use the trauma training videos as part of training for foster parents and kinship care providers during their regularly scheduled training throughout the year. The team felt that showing a video like the “ReMoved” video that is used in the NCTSN curriculum would help them to facilitate discussions with foster parent and kinship care providers about trauma effects, triggers, and reminders that children experience during their foster care experiences. They see this as leading to more overall understanding about what foster children go through and why they demonstrate various behaviors during their foster care experience. Sharon Schueneman states that, “A huge take away from the training videos was to remember that everyone has a different story to tell, and everyone’s trauma is different. This will affect the way we work with children and families.” We are so excited to already be witnessing the results of this training in the work that Cabarrus County is doing in their community!
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