Happy New Year! Thank you for all the support you have given us!
By Lee White, President
The beginning of the new year is a good time to reflect on the past and adjust our goals. This is especially true now, because like most businesses, last year caught us by surprise. For the past 16+ years, we have been building the Foster Parent College website and gradually getting agencies to transition to online foster parent training. With the pandemic, all that has changed. Now, for many states, counties, and agencies, we are the go-to site for training; parents and agency staff can easily access our online courses and management system from wherever they are, and both our in-service and blended pre-service trainings have been proven effective. We feel grateful that we have been able to support resource families and child welfare agencies during these trying times.
Because usage of our website has increased dramatically over the past year, we have adjusted our goals for 2021, as we continue to respond to agency needs. This year, we will be adding two ways for states and agencies to add their own material for training their parents. First, starting this spring, states and agencies will be able to add handouts to our existing courses, for example, adding their state's Foster Youth Bill of Rights to our course on Supporting Normalcy. Additionally, soon agencies will be able to upload their own trainings. These agency-produced trainings, which will be available only to the agency's parents, can be integrated into our Series Training Program.
At the same time, we are improving ADA accessibility of our courses and website (see below), and we have begun work on updating the look of the website. These are all big programming projects that we hope to complete by the end of 2021.
We are also striving to add five new or updated courses to our offerings on topics like postsecondary education, FASD, eating problems, and autism spectrum disorders (see below).
Finally, I want to thank our staff, from production and customer support to programmers, office staff, and research folks. I can only say that each team member is an outstanding person who performs their role with love, knowledge, and dedication to our mission. And a big thank you to all of you who use FPC; we have learned a lot from your course reviews and the questions asked by agency staff. Our website will continue to grow and improve as we move forward through 2021.
ADA Accessibility at Foster Parent College
By Ben James
At Foster Parent College, we are striving to make our website accessible to all of our members, including those who experience disabilities and use alternative means to access the internet. The journey to full accessibility began back in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, when in-person classes were suddenly canceled, and many of our member agencies started using Foster Parent College as a safe, distance-learning alternative to in-person meetings and classes. We had already begun the process of closed captioning for our courses but knew that making the site fully accessible would be a vitally important project as well.
As a former special education teacher and member of the FPC support team, I know firsthand the importance of having the right teaching tools and methods to differentiate and individualize curriculum so all learners can benefit. Online learning platforms can have the means to deliver education in the way that an individual learns best, and the FPC development team strives to do so. In addition to taking into consideration the use of assistive devices and screen reading software, we also had to think about how we could design courses going forward with web accessibility and different learning styles in mind. Some considerations we had to take into account were using high-contrast color schemes for members with visual impairments, hover states and title tags for all interactive buttons, and narration boxes that screen readers can access to provide descriptions of on-screen content.
We are making progress! As of this writing, we have added preliminary accessibility features to 57 of our online courses. While there is still a long way to go before all FPC courses are fully accessible, we are looking forward to hitting our goal of meeting or exceeding ADA requirements for the entire website in 2021.
To be continued… in the Spring 2021 Solutions
Siblings in Care bonus section added to The Child Welfare Team
Theresa Reed, MEd
Sibling relationships are often unique connections that can have a lifetime impact on the siblings' lives. For children in care, resource parents have an obligation to help them maintain these connections. In early January, we updated the course, The Child Welfare Team, to include the Siblings in Care bonus section. This special section highlights the best practices for helping children maintain a relationship with their siblings (when it is safe for them to do so). It concludes by encouraging new resource parents to consider providing care for siblings. This special section is led by Theresa Reed, MEd, who has been training resource families for the past two decades.
[Note: This update is available only in the stand-alone version of The Child Welfare Team; it is not available in the CWLA or NWM legacy clusters.]
Spanish translation of Children Entering Care: Mental Health Issues
“Roughly 80% of the children in care have some mental health issues, and often we can diagnose more than one mental health disorder,” says Dr. Robert Nickel, instructor for the course, Children Entering Care: Mental Health Issues. This course was developed specifically to help resource parents identify possible mental health problems when a child joins their family, and it is intended to pair with our course on physical health issues.
In early January, we launched Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud mental, the Spanish version of this course. View a preview here:
fosterparentcollege.com/course-info/mental-health-sp. This is the 17th Spanish language course available on the FPC website. All of our courses in Spanish offer the same functionality and interactivity as their counterparts in English. To see the full list of FPC courses available in Spanish, visit
fosterparentcollege.com/info/full-list.jsp#spanCourses.
Courses in Production
The scripting and production teams at Foster Parent College are currently working on these courses, which we are looking forward to sharing with you and your parents:
Preparing Teens for Postsecondary Education (in production, available Spring 2021)
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) (in production)
Eating and Food Issues, 2 nd Edition (script being finalized)
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2 nd Edition (being scripted)
Motivational Interviewing for Resource Parents (being scripted)
Lying and “Untruths”, 3 rd Edition (being scripted)
Sexual and Reproductive Health (in pre-scripting)
We have also begun working with our translator, Mr. Omar Canals, to translate three more courses into Spanish. Translated and dubbed versions of these courses should be available next fall and winter.
Escalating Behavior Unwrapped
Grief and Loss in the Care System
The Role of Mandatory Child Abuse Reporters
Finally, just over a year ago, we retired the course, Working with Birth Parents: Visitation. After much consideration and feedback from our users, we have brought the course out of retirement. This course is now available again on FosterParentCollege.com with updated handouts and closed captioning.
Administrator's Tool Box: How to End and Archive Old Series
For agencies with Unlimited Accounts, our Series Training Program provides the ability to create consistent training cycles.
We recently released our “Series Best Practices” guide, which includes the recommendation that agency administrators run a series for a limited duration of time to avoid management issues like longer load times. We suggest starting a new cohort every 3 to 6 months. You can find this guide on our agency tutorial page:
fosterparentcollege.com/info/agencytutorial.jsp
To build on this best practice, we also recommend ending and archiving a series once all trainees have completed their training. Here's how, in 4 steps:
Ending and Archiving a Series Instance:
Step 1: Log in to FPC and Navigate to the Group Where the Series is Located.
Click on subgroup name.
Click "open".
Step 2: Navigate to the Series Training Program page.
Click "Courses" tab.
Click "Series" subtab.
Click the title of the series you want to end.
Step 3: End Your Series.
When the series portal opens, click on the "Series" tab.
Click on the "Start/End" subtab.
Click "end" (any members with an incomplete series will be dropped out).
Step 4: Archive Your Series.
Click on the "Basic Info" subtab.
Click "archive".
Congratulations, you have successfully ended and archived your series!
About FosterParentCollege.com
FosterParentCollege.com has been providing online, interactive courses designed specifically for foster, adoptive, and kinship families since 2004. Today we have over 70 courses available. Most of our courses are trauma informed, and FPC has been recognized by the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC). Staff at participating agencies have access to our administrative management system, which lets them register parents as users, assign courses, distribute handouts, and track program progress. At the same time, resource parents have the flexibility to take courses at their own convenience and pace, wherever internet access is available.
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