Moving from procedure to practice: a statewide child protection simulation training model

ABSTRACT

In FY 2015 the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services partnered with the University of Illinois Springfield to develop the Child Protection Training Academy in order to redesign the six-week classroom training for new investigators and create an experiential component. This paper chronicles the goals of the partnership and the planning and implementation of the Academy.

KEYWORDS:

• Child protection
• child welfare; training
• workforce development
• simulation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Taylor McCarthy for her assistance with the preparation of the manuscript.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Betsy P. Goulet

Betsy P. Goulet is a faculty member in the Department of Public Administration at University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS), and has considerable experience related to child protection. She has been a child protection investigator, a founding director of the Sangamon County Children’s Advocacy Center, and the first president of the Illinois Chapter of Children’s Advocacy Centers. Following NCPTC’s model, Dr. Goulet established a Child Advocacy Studies (CAST) educational program at UIS and has collaborated with NCPTC on training and program development for a number of years. In 2016 she developed the new simulation model for training front line child protection investigators, working with Susan Evans to revise the six- week Child Protection Foundation Training.

Theodore P. Cross

Theodore P. Cross is a senior research professor at the Children and Family Research Center in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana –Champaign. He is the principal investigator of the program evaluation of the Child Protection Training Academy. He directed the Multi-Site Evaluation of Children’s Advocacy Centers and the 2017 Illinois Child Well-Being Study, an assessment of the well-being of children in out-of-home care in the state. He has more than thirty years’ experience as a researcher studying the system response to child maltreatment, and numerous related publications and presentations.

Yu-Ling Chiu

Yu-Ling Chiu is a Research Specialist at the Children and Family Research Center in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She has worked on numerous program evaluations of child welfare programs and published in the areas of child welfare and juvenile justice. Before earning her doctorate, she worked as a practicing social worker in Taiwan for four years. Her research interests concern child protection, foster care, crossover youth services, child and family well-being, and child welfare workforce development.

Susan Evans

Susan Evans is the former Director of the Child Protection Training Academy and is now Director of Error Reduction Training for the Office of the DCFS Inspector General at the University of Illinois Springfield. Before moving to the University of Illinois Springfield, Susan spent 24 years working for the IL Department of Children and Family Services, first in the field as an investigator and then for ten years training frontline staff. Susan has developed numerous curricula for child welfare workers and was instrumental in the design and implementation of the simulation training launched in 2016 at the University of Illinois Springfield.