![Fall 2020 Solutions Newsletter](/interface/assets/img/solutions-banner.jpg)
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A Note from the President of Foster Parent College
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, Foster Parent College has been able to provide a safe way to help agencies serve both their pre-licensed and licensed parents throughout the country.
Our customer support team is available during West Coast business hours (Monday through Friday, 8:30am to 5:00pm) to help agency staff and parents, if needed. Additionally, we have a number of website help pages and tutorials, which let both parents and staff be self-sufficient. We appreciate all the positive comments we have received and hope we are making a difference in the lives of the children who are being cared for and their families.
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Now Available: Escalating Behavior Unwrapped
When children's emotions and behaviors escalate, it can feel like the world is spiraling out of control. It doesn't have to be that way. Our new course, Escalating Behavior Unwrapped, helps parents understand their child's escalating behavior and how they can intervene before or during the event to help their child—and themselves—de-escalate.
Escalating Behavior Unwrapped is presented by Dr. Martha Merchant, a licensed clinical psychologist and nationally recognized expert on trauma, who has a special interest in foster care. She notes that, "When children get escalated, they need an adult to help them calm down or de-escalate." With a warm heart and clear language, Doc Martha, as she likes to be called, first helps parents understand what is happening in children's brains when an escalating event takes place. Next, using exercises and discussions, she explains how to respond prior to or during an escalation in such a way as to help the child get regulated or regain control. The training also explores what parents can do to prevent escalations in the first place and what to do after an escalating event.
To watch a short preview of Escalating Behavior Unwrapped, visit
fosterparentcollege.com/course-info/de-escalation. (Note: The Trauma-informed Parenting course is a prerequisite for this course.)
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New Courses Available in Spanish
For the past year, we have been working with our Spanish translator and reviewers to make our courses on the physical and mental health issues of children entering care available in Spanish. Earlier this fall, Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud física (the Spanish version of Children Entering Care: Physical Health Issues) became available online. The companion course, Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud mental (the Spanish version of Children Entering Care: Mental Health Issues), will be available by the end of the year. Although FPC is primarily an English-language website, we are committed to providing our courses to as many parents and families as possible.
![Course image from Preventing and Reducing Escalating Behavior.](assets/cover-health-sp2.jpg)
To see the full list of FPC courses available in Spanish, visit
fosterparentcollege.com/info/full-list.jsp#spanCourses.
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Administrator's Tool Chest: Customized Welcome Emails
When agencies register new members on Foster Parent College, they can send automated, customized "welcome emails." FPC staff would like to call attention to this useful tool. With it, the agency can easily provide special instructions for newly registered members, such as which courses should be taken or whom to contact at the agency for certification inquiries.
Agencies can create a custom welcome email in their primary group (the agency that pays FPC), which will be inherited by every subgroup. Alternatively, a subgroup or lower tier agency can create a custom welcome email individually, which will reach only their group.
At the request of agencies that are using this tool, we recently expanded the character count of the welcome emails to 5,000.
To Create a Custom Welcome Email
- Open the group where you want to create a custom welcome email.
![Image of Step 1.](assets/step1.jpg)
- Click the "Register Members" tab and then click "customize message".
![Image of Step 2.](assets/step2.jpg)
- Click "edit". Please note: Currently the only formatting available is regular or bold text. To make text bold, use the HTML code text. Please do not use any other HTML coding.
![Image of Step 3.](assets/step3.jpg)
- Enter your custom message into the field and click "save". Please note: This custom email will be saved until it is changed again. You can always reset the message to the default by clicking "reset".
![Image of Step 4](assets/step4.jpg)
Please note: By default, our system is set to send a welcome email.
![Image of Step 4 end.](assets/step5.jpg)
As always, the Foster Parent College customer support team is here to assist agency staff and members with any technical support Monday-Friday, 8:30am-5:00pm Pacific time.
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Supporting People with Disabilities
The FosterParentCollege.com staff is actively working to improve our website to support people who have disabilities. Our goal is to meet or exceed ADA requirements while maintaining the quality of our courses.
We are currently creating closed captions (CC) for all courses, a process which takes time because of our interactive exercises. Currently, over one third of our courses (including all pre-service courses) are available with CC, and we will continue the work until all courses are closed captioned.
At the same time, our programmers have begun the process of making our courses, and our website, more accessible to users who use screen reading software or other assistive technologies to access the internet.
We expect to complete the CC and screen reading assistance project in 2021. In the meantime, courses available with closed captioning have a "CC" next to the title. You can see a list of completed courses by visiting
fosterparentcollege.com/info/accessibility.jsp.
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Course Viewing Problems
People taking our courses use a wide array of browsers, devices, and operating systems. While we can't support them all, we strive to support the ones most commonly used, as indicated by our course tracking features. Because cell phones and tablets are being used more frequently, our programmers recently revised our course viewer to greatly improve the user experience on mobile devices.
If viewers have technical problems with a course, we encourage them to use the self-help features and system diagnostics tool. If there continues to be a problem, they should use the "Send a Comment" button in the upper right of the screen. When viewers use this feature, our customer support team not only receives the comment, but the message also includes helpful information about the user's operating system. This lets our staff provide more focused support.
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Recent and Upcoming Courses
FosterParentCollege.com is continually creating new courses and updating existing ones. These are the courses currently in production:
- Escalating Behavior Unwrapped (released October 2020)
- Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud física (Spanish translation of Children Entering Care: Physical Health Issues, released November 2020)
- Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud mental (Spanish translation of Children Entering Care: Mental Health Issues, to be released later this year)
- Siblings in Care, supplemental section to The Child Welfare Team (in production, to be released December 2020)
- Preparing for Post-Secondary Education, Grades 6 to 10 (in production, to be released Spring 2021)
- Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (in production)
- Eating Issues with Children in Care, 2nd Edition (scripting near completion)
- Children with Autism, 2nd Edition (being scripted)
- Motivational Interviewing for Resource Parents (being scripted)
- Sexual and Reproductive Health (in pre-scripting)
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About FosterParentCollege.com
"We strive to give foster, adoptive, and kinship parents the knowledge and tools they need to raise children who will thrive in today's world." These words are the mission of Foster Parent College, and they greet visitors who enter our offices in Eugene, Oregon. Since 2004, FosterParentCollege.com has been providing online, interactive courses designed specifically for resource families. FPC has contracts with many states, counties, and agencies to provide online pre-service courses that can be blended with in-person meetings, as well as in-service courses for parents who are caring for children in their families. Today, we offer almost 70 courses (including 17 in Spanish) and have provided more than 650,000 trainings to parents and staff.
Additionally, to ensure the proven-effective knowledge and tools we provide are understood and retained by resource parents, we continue to research our courses. FPC has been recognized as "promising research" by the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC). To learn more about our mission, history, and successes, visit
fosterparentcollege.com/info/about-us.jsp.
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Connect with Us
support@fosterparentcollege.com
facebook.com/fosterparentcollege
instagram.com/fosterparentcollege
linkedin.com/company/fosterparentcollege.com
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