CHILD WELFARE
Illinois caseworkers now have information
they need online
Craig Chamberlain,
Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@illinois.edu
6/1/02
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
The stack of pages stands as tall as the person who has to use it. It's everything
a child welfare worker in Illinois needs to know or reference, and it's always
changing, with each new rule, procedure, law, etc.
Soon, however, those thousands of pages may be gathering dust in many offices.
Illinois' child welfare workers, dealing with an estimated 100,000 children
in both state and private agencies, now have an electronic "help"
manual at their fingertips. It's available online or on CD-ROM, easily searchable,
and always up-to-date. It also may be the first resource of its kind in any
state.
The new DCFS Web Resource, officially introduced last month, resulted from two
very different sources of assistance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
both working in collaboration with the Illinois Department of Children and Family
Services.
Social work expertise came from the university's Children and Family Research
Center (CFRC), in the School of Social Work. Information technology expertise
came from the Prairienet Community Network, an outreach service of the Graduate
School of Library and Information Science. DCFS provided input through administrators
and through focus groups of frontline caseworkers and investigators.
Central to this technological solution is the concept of single-source publishing
and the automation of the Web site production process, says Michelle Kessler,
a CFRC research specialist and the project's coordinator. When DCFS staff make
changes to master documents, the entire Web site, containing thousands of pages,
in regular and text-only versions, can be updated at the click of a button.
The Web site then can be compiled into a format for writing to CD, for use by
caseworkers and investigators with either limited Internet access or using notebook
computers, Kessler said.
Making it all easy to update was "critical," said John Poertner, the
CFRC's director and interim dean of the School of Social Work, "because
the information changes weekly, changes daily." On the Web site, those
changes can be made at least weekly, and new CDs can be distributed at least
monthly. Child welfare workers can be more efficient with their time and more
confident they have the latest information, in order to better assure children
have safe and permanent homes, he said.
Prairienet brought to the project its years of experience consulting with community
non-profits and social service agencies, and a strong client-centered philosophy,
according to Karen Fletcher, Prairienet's manager of community information resources
and the project's technical manager. "Because we work so closely with the
organization, we try to get them to drive the process as much as possible, so
that by the time we're done, they really feel fully invested," and can
move toward managing it all themselves, Fletcher said.