Muskie School of Public Service

Join the Children, Youth, and Families program, Maine Youth Transition Collaborative, and community partners in recognition of National Foster Care Awareness Month. During the week of May 14 – 18, engage in discussions, learn from presentations and panels, and view artwork, photographs, and other visuals that reflect the true stories of youth in transition from foster care. All events will be held in the Wishcamper Center, 34 Bedford Street, USM Portland Campus.

Display: Stories of Youth in Transition from Foster Care
May 14 – May 18
Wishcamper Center Forum

Starting Monday, May 14, the Wishcamper Center’s Billings-Nicoll Forum will be the site of a week-long display that showcases the many faces of youth transitioning from systems of care, as well as some of the community partners around Maine who are dedicated to improving the successful transition of these young people to adulthood. The display, sponsored by the Maine Youth Transition Collaborative (MYTC), will feature posters, photographs, and youth artwork.

Community Forum and Youth Panel Discussion
Special Presenter: Dianna Walters
Tuesday, May 15, 2:00 p.m.
Lee Community Hall (Rm 133)

Join the Maine Youth Transition Collaborative at the USM Wishcamper Center on May 15 at 2:00 p.m. for a community forum and presentation by Dianna Walters of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative. The talk, The Adolescent Brain: New Research and Its Implications for Youth People Transitioning from Foster Care, will be followed by a youth in care panel discussion.

An alumna of Maine’s foster care system, Dianna worked closely with the Youth Leadership Advisory Team and served as a Foster Youth Intern for Senator John Kerry, raising awareness of critical issues facing foster youth and informing policy on both a state and national level. Dianna’s presentation and youth panel discussion will give an excellent overview and opportunity to discuss the emerging findings on adolescent brain development and what it means to Maine youth in transition. Dianna is also a spring graduate of Muskie’s PPM program.

Click here to register.

Film: Ask Us Who We Are
Friday, May 18, 7:00 p.m.
Lee Community Hall (Rm 133)

On Friday, May 18, at 7:00 p.m., the documentary film Ask Us Who We Are by Vermont filmmaker Bess O’Brien will be shown in the Wishcamper Center’s Lee Community Hall.  The film deals with youth in foster care and the search for belonging. A panel discussion will follow the screening with O’Brien, one of the young people from the film, and several Maine youth in care. A $5 donation is suggested. For more information, contact Beth Simmons at 878-9663.

The New Americans project, a collaboration between the USM Muskie School and Oldham Innovative Research, has released its final report, New Americans: Child Care Decision-making of Refugee and Immigrant Parents of English Language Learners, an in-depth exploration of two cities whose experiences with immigration reflect those of the country as a whole.

The study, co-authored by Helen Ward and Julie Atkins of the Cutler Institute’s Children, Youth & Families program, focuses on new American communities in Denver, Colorado, and Portland, Maine: Mexican immigrants in the former and Cambodian, Somali, and Sudanese refugees in the latter. With the help of a diverse advisory committee, project staff sought to identify and understand the factors, both across and within cultures, that influence the child care decisions of refugee and immigrant parents.

“It is critical to include the voices of these parents when considering policies that will affect their children and families,” the authors note. A better understanding of the child care experiences and concerns of these parents, along with an enhanced capacity to serve these families in a culturally sensitive and welcoming way and greater access to high quality programs, are important components of efforts to boost the school readiness of children from refugee and immigrant families.

Findings from New Americans will help inform policy making as well as the practices of child care providers and local, state, and private nonprofit agencies in both meeting the child care needs of the refugee and immigrant communities, and enhancing the later school success of young ELL children. In addition, the authors hope this study will help establish the groundwork for future examination of these issues, particularly as they apply to communities with multiple cultural groups, an increasingly common reality across the United States.

To read the full report and find other information about the New Americans project, please visit: http://muskie.usm.maine.edu/newamericans/index.html.

This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children, Youth and Families, Office of Policy, Research and Evaluation.

The National Child Welfare Resource Center for Organizational Improvement (NRCOI), housed at the USM Muskie School, recently introduced a new online resource, the Supervisor Training Project, after months of data collection on how states train and support child welfare supervisors.

Staff reached out to child welfare training staff representatives in all states to participate in a one-hour phone interview, which covered topics like pre-service training, ongoing training, professional development, and supports for supervisors. A total of 34 states took part in the process, and overall the NRCOI received very positive feedback.

Information on the current approaches taken by these states has been compiled on the project website, along with available curricula and materials. The NRCOI hopes both state agencies and the Children’s Bureau T/TA Network use this information to generate training ideas and to understand how other States approach supervision training and support.

For more information on the project, please visit: http://muskie.usm.maine.edu/helpkids/supervisionproject.htm

The National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI), a partnership between the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, and eight universities throughout the nation, has been awarded the 2011 Quality Award by the National Staff Development and Training Association (NSDTA).

Given annually in recognition of outstanding performance in the field of training and development, the award recognizes the ground-breaking development and implementation of the NCWWI Leadership Academy, including two innovative, comprehensive approaches to workforce training: the Leadership Academy for Middle Managers (LAMM) and the Leadership Academy for Supervisors (LAS).

The LAS, offered online, and the LAMM, a hybrid of online and residential learning, build the capacity of the nation’s child welfare workforce at two distinct levels and support organizational transformations that lead to improved outcomes for children, families and communities. Offered at no cost to organizations and individuals, the academies serve as powerful professional development opportunities for those seeking leadership roles within the field to effect change.

The Muskie School’s Freda Bernotavicz, LAS team leader, said of the academies, “Working on the NCWWI Leadership Academy has been a wonderful professional experience for us all.  We are privileged to be part of a national network of people committed to improving outcomes for vulnerable children, youth and families.”

Funded through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Children’s Bureau and Administration for Children & Families, the NCWWI is part of an overall national systems reform effort to build leadership capacity at all levels of the child welfare system. In addition to the Leadership Academy, the Institute provides online resource libraries, assessment services, and peer networking sites. The Leadership Academy team at the Muskie School includes Freda Bernotavicz, Sue Eberseten, Crystal French, Lee Lauritsen, DeeDee Reardon, Gretchen Robbins, Marshall Soloway and Laura Woods-Vachon.

The 2011 Quality Award will be presented at the NSDTA Annual Conference in Madison, Wis., this October.  To learn more about the NCWWI, visit http://www.ncwwi.org/.

The South Portland School Department recently launched a pilot preschool aimed at developing the literacy, language, and social skills of district 4-year olds. The program is a response to the widening achievement gap between students who have had formal early childhood education and those who have not.

Youth Alternatives Ingraham Family Center, site of the preschool program.

Sue Reed, Director of Muskie’s Early Literacy for Every Child project, will provide training and technical assistance to the district as they implement Opening the World of Learning (OWL), a pre-K curriculum with a particular focus on language and literacy. The USM Muskie School previously utilized the OWL curriculum in Portland preschools as part of its Early Reading First grant.

Jodelle Austin, recently an Early Literacy Coach at the Muskie School, has accepted a position as the first public preschool teacher in South Portland.

The South Portland preschool initially will involve a dozen students from the Brickill/Redbank neighborhood, but the district hopes to offer universal access to public preschools for all South Portland 4-year olds by 2015.

Research associate Brenda Zollitch and Allyson Dean, director of Maine Roads to Quality, have recently authored two research and policy briefs on early childhood education.

The first, “Authentic Assessment in Infant & Toddler Care Settings” reviews the current research in this field and indicates that “authentic assessment” approaches can help children develop at a more appropriate pace, enable caregivers to better assess and serve infants and toddlers, and positively influence teacher behaviors, teaching materials, and groupings of activities.

The second, “Early Childhood Professional Development,” finds that it is difficult to prove that any one professional development activity will result in improved child care. Rather, a variety of activities appears to have the greatest effect.

“The precursor to reading success is exposure to a lot of language and literacy from birth to 5 years of age: at home, in child care, in preschool or Head Start,” wrote Sue Reed, director of the Early Reading First project (more…)