One of the main strengths I bring to the school is broad experience in many different aspects of the social work services provided to children and families as well as particular expertise in school social work. Prior to coming to graduate school I worked in runaway shelters and residential treatment programs for adolescents. Since receiving my MSW I have worked as a family therapist, drug and alcohol educator for teens, a caseworker in public child welfare services, a school social worker and school linked services coordinator, a school district administrator for student support services, and as a program evaluator, grant writer, and supervisor for a private consultation firm serving school based service programs. I have substantial experience both in direct practice as well as the management and planning aspects of social work.

At the same time I have a broad breadth of experience I have also developed more in depth knowledge in school social work. My understanding of school social work has also evolved with time and experience. At first, working with kids at school was a matter of convenience and efficiency. School is, after all, where they spend most of their waking hours. Over time, I came to realize that the schools offer a whole range of services that are important to helping children develop into happy, healthy, productive adults and that I, as a social worker, needed to access those services on behalf of my clients if I wished to help them effectively. Working with the schools became less a matter of convenience than a necessity. Conversely, as I worked to develop more school based programs for foster children and in disadvantaged communities I also developed an awareness that the schools really need additional support for many of their students particularly disadvantaged children - if they are to be able to achieve their mission which is to provide all children with a free and appropriate public education.

So my emphasis in school social work has really been focused on how schools and social service agencies work collaboratively to meet the needs of the children they serve.

When I arrived here I discovered that the school had hired another new faculty member who has an interest in school social work. Professor Susan Stone and I have discussed a variety of projects we hope to work together on and I am very excited about the possibilities. We have been discussing the development of research projects that will demonstrate and/or improve the efficacy of school social work services. We have also begun the process of obtaining support to conduct meta-analyses of school-based programs and are discussing ways of looking at the process of interagency collaboration.

Describe your experiences working as a school social worker? What were some of your greatest challenges? What do you have to offer to a student working on an MSW degree at UC Berkeley? (answered that above) How do you think the role of the school social worker will change in the next 10 years and how do we prepare our students for these changes?

I sort of backed into school social work because of my initial interest in doing family therapy with adolescents. My first job out of graduate school was working in a community based agency that provided family therapy for substance abusing teens and also out-stationed counselors on school campuses two days a week. I did that for a couple of years and for a variety of reasons decided to try my hand working in Child Protective Services.
It was somewhat serendipitous that a year or so after I went to work for Contra Costa County Child Welfare Services that the Mt. Diablo Unified School District Foster Youth Services Program was looking for a child welfare worker with experience working in the schools to serve as a liaison between the school district and the child welfare workers. It was one of the first concrete collaborative efforts between these two agencies and for a while I was trotted out at meetings as a living, breathing manifestation of interagency collaboration.

I also had a unique opportunity there in that the person in the school district that I reported to - Rich Clarke who was an incredibly visionary and creative school district administrator and who became a tremendous mentor and friend of mine was trekking in Nepal for the first month I worked there. When he came back I presented him with a plan as to how I, as a half time social worker, was going to serve the 200 foster children attending school there. That plan included many of the elements that are in place in that program today: A social work intern training program, systematic outreach and training for child welfare workers, a more detailed method of documenting services and a blue print for formalizing the collaboration between the systems so that interagency collaboration was not entirely dependent on the one person (me) acting as a liaison. I also laid out how I planned to spend my time providing direct services to the foster children at the schools. To his everlasting credit he simply said, "OK".

So I spent ten years working directly with foster children and helping to develop more effective ways for the program to serve the children. The program development work eventually led me to working with the Healthy Start programs which involved helping to develop processes by which schools and service providers could work together more effectively in low income communities to help children overcome the health, emotional, social, and financial barriers to learning they face. After coordinating an award winning Healthy Start program in Concord I went to work in Richmond as an administrator in the West Contra Costa Unified School District where I worked for almost two years as an administrator overseeing 11 Healthy Start grants in that district.

Practicing school social work at both a micro (direct services to clients) level and a macro (community and systems based) level has given me a wider understanding of how social work methods can be effective in creating positive change for children and their families.

Because of this, I think that we need to revamp the way school social work has traditionally been practiced and focused on helping one child at a time. While I think it is important to be an effective counselor and advocate for individual children, I also think that it is important to have an impact on the communities they live in and the systems that serve them so that they are more responsive to the children's and their families' needs

I think we need to prepare our students both in the methods of working with one person at a time and in applying that same skill set to working with larger sets of client systems i.e., families, groups of families, sets of agencies that work with specific children and families, communities of families, groups of agencies that work in communities, groups of communities, and so on. These sets of systems all require the basic skills of active listening, assessment, defining goals and objectives, developing ways of intervening, and evaluating the effectiveness of the interventions which is what we learn to do with individual clients. And working with individual clients requires working effectively within those larger groups and understanding how those other systems serve our clients. I think that applying these skills within the public school system is the most vital simply because it is the one system that the vast majority of our child clients will be served by at some point in their lives

I strongly believe that in order to be most effective in working with children in families that we need to work across traditional service boundaries. That I have considerable practice doing just that that is perhaps, the most unique thing I bring to UC Berkeley. My hope is that our training of social workers that will specialize in working with children and families will be strengthened in how it emphasizes working collaboratively with the public schools. Working collaboratively can no longer be a "nice idea" that we really do not have the time for if we hope to be most effective in helping children and families.

What is the Pupil Personnel Services Credential and how does that prepare students for positions as school social workers?

The Pupil Personnel Services Credential is awarded by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing to school social workers, school psychologists, school counselors, and child welfare and attendance supervisors. Earning the credential prepares students to work as school social workers in two ways.

First, by taking the required coursework and completing field work internships in school settings it provides prospective school social workers with an important set of skills and knowledge to work effectively in the public schools. The public schools are governed by a set of rules, mandates, and service structures that are very different than those that govern most social service agencies. The PPSC coursework gives the students an opportunity to understand this particular environment so that they can effectively put into practice the other social work skills they learn here.

Second, the credential is often required in order to be employed directly by a school district. Although many, if not most, social workers that work in schools are employed through agencies that contract with school districts there is some growth in the number employed directly by the schools. We hope that this trend will continue and that someday we may be able to get back to the number that were employed prior to the passage of Proposition 13 which severely slashed all public funding of services. However, schools are also in a position of not being able to hire social workers with a PPSC simply because there are often not enough qualified people available. There is a social worker shortage in all areas of the social service system and it extends to schools too.

You have worked with foster youth in public education. Describe your experiences with foster youth. How do they fare today? How many foster youth currently attend secondary schools in California and what impact do their numbers have on secondary education in this state? How can social workers help foster youth in the transition to independence?

I have worked with foster youth as a group home counselor, as a child welfare worker, and as a school social worker and I have had both very rewarding and very difficult experiences with them. People who have been treated badly do not often present themselves as poor innocent victims. Foster children have to have been treated badly by someone and so more often than not they are guarded, untrusting, angry, and sometimes vengeful. Children in foster care usually do not want to be removed from their parents care they just want to be treated better there. So, they do not necessarily want the help being offered by the social worker on the scene. I have relished taking on the challenge of connecting with kids who seem bent on driving people away and when I have been successful it has been very rewarding personally and professionally. I got to know a handful of these kids really well and ended up being more impressed by their resiliency than anything else. It is amazing what some kids have had to deal with in their short lives and can still function day to day.

They have probably taught me a lot more about how important it is and what it takes to be a good social worker and a good person than I have learned anywhere else.

I think there are about 100,000 children in Foster Care in California and so of that number there are about 20,000 25,000 in secondary education. I do not know the current numbers but historically their rate of high school graduation, employment, and self-sufficiency have been very low and their rate of homelessness, incarceration, and early pregnancy have been very high. These are not good outcomes.

Youth in foster care make up about 1% of the overall population of children and when the school staff notices them, more often than not it is not for good reasons. We really do not do a good job helping foster children throughout their educational careers in a way that will help them overcome the tremendous social and emotional barriers they face. Social workers assume that the schools or foster parents will deal with their foster children's' educational needs. But the school system assumes that each child is accompanied by a parent or responsible adult who is knowledgeable about his or her educational history and will take an active part in assisting with school and advocating for special needs. This is a bad combination of false assumptions and further combined with the prior trauma the children have experienced it is a recipe for failure.

On the bright side, the Foster Youth Services programs have been expanded to cover all group home children in the state and there is considerable support in the State Assembly for expanding the program to all foster children if the budget allows.

Many counties have Independent Living Skills Programs to help foster youth transition into adulthood. However, if we have dropped the ball helping them transition to new schools or helping them get educational services in their younger years then the ILSP program is too little too late.

What inspires you? What motivates you? What advice would you give to the college senior who is considering going into social work?

I have always enjoyed children and long desired to battle unfairness and injustice on their behalf. That combined with my mother's insistence that "any job worth doing is worth doing well" have always been the motivators for me to work hard on children's behalf.

Now in my role as a teacher I hope that I can motivate others to work on children's behalf and point them in the right direction so that they can do it well. I figure that by doing that with a couple of dozen new social workers a year I can contribute to a whole bunch more kids getting the help they need.

My late father who was a high school jazz educator also inspires me. He was adored by his students and widely respected by his peers to the point where they sponsored a music scholarship in his name after he died. If I can be half as successful and have as much fun teaching the art of social work as he did teaching jazz then I will consider myself very successful.

To those thinking about social work as a career:

Social work is a fascinating and rewarding career but it warrants some checking out before you decide to embark on it. It is a very demanding profession and requires a great deal of commitment and willingness to deal with emotionally charged situations. It is not for the faint hearted or those primarily looking for good pay and working conditions. I highly recommend that people interested in it as a career work in some entry-level positions with the type of people you want to end working with prior to enrolling in an MSW program. If you want to work with children go work in a residential treatment center or group home or day treatment center for a couple of years. After that, if you still want to go into social work, the work experience will give you an advantage when applying to graduate school and will also help put the ideas and theories taught in class in context.

In a broader sense, you have to really enjoy working with other people even people you may not immediately like. You also have to feel that helping other people is the most important thing for you to do, because there are some days, or weeks, where it is not a whole lot of fun and so you may need to remember the higher purpose and ideals to which you have committed yourself in order to weather the current storm. Which is not to say that it is always stormy but it is not all that sunny either.

In any event, it is a job well worth doing and doing well.

Information on Robert Ayasse can be found at the following link:
http://socialwelfare.berkeley.edu/faculty/Ayasse.htm