I did my practicum at Baker Victory Services in Lackawanna. There are a couple of different branches of services at this organization. I worked in the preventive services department. I spent the majority of my time there shadowing the caseworkers around during their daily activities. All of the workers there were very nice people and very easy to get along with. They were all happy to answer any questions that I had about the cases. The clients varied from children, adults and families. The clients are referred to Baker Victory Services by the county, which is how Baker Victory is funded. The clients are sometimes court mandated a caseworker or referred through a school due to issues that the child has in class.
One thing that made this practicum interesting was the diversity of the types of clients. There were some common problems that families had such as domestic violence and trouble in school, but each family was different so the days went by fast. I also got to accompany a couple of caseworkers and their client to a court case, which I though was interesting even though the court system is very slow. Another thing that I found interesting was a two day training session for all of the employees about domestic violence. Baker Victory periodically has mandatory training sessions for the workers to help them with their job for certain situations. I also had the opportunity to go to a common sense parenting class which was help downtown. The title of the class was indicative of the material that was covered, but the majority people in the class were court mandated to be there and did not know the things that were being taught. I do not think that some of the people in that class should have children because of some of the ways they talked about disciplining them. In addition, some of the people in that class did not even know what the ages and how many children that they had, which is ridiculous.
In typical day I would see things such as the caseworker helping to resolve arguments between family members to simply interacting with the children of a particular family. In a nutshell, the goal of preventive services is to prevent the children in the assigned family to going into foster care. There children are put into a high risk category for a particular reason so extra help is needed to help these children. So the tasks that a caseworker has to accomplish in a home visit can be varied. The majority of the time is spent making sure that the family is not experiencing problems and the children are in a good living situation. The majority of the cases are referred because of the children and the problems usually go much deeper than that. The whole family dynamic needs to be addressed, which is why a child is a certain way.
One thing that I did not like about the job is that some of the cases it seemed that they had to a babysitter the parents of a family. For example, the caseworker had to do things such as make sure that the children went to doctors appointments and make sure that the parent paid their bills on time. I would not be able to do this because I think that people should be able to do this type of thing on their own. For reasons such as this I would not be able to be a caseworker. I am more interested in deeper problems with people rather than helping them with their daily lives. The caseworker does deal with these problems as well though. I have tremendous respect for the people that are caseworkers. They can be put into very stressful situations and the pay for a caseworker is not very good.
I think that this practicum was a great experience. If you are interested in going into to social work or any other clinical work I think that Baker Victory is a great organization to be able to show you some of the problems that people have first hand. I was exposed to a variety of different situations and this made me realize things about myself that I would not have at this point in my life without this experience.
PracticumExperiences
