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Session 12. 
April 13 to April 20

Combined time in class and on discussion boards should equal about 3.5 hours. Class meets on the first day of the session at 6:00 p.m.      This page tells you what you should do during this session, from the first day of the session when we meet through to the last hour before our meeting on the last day of the session.

Class session lasts from April 13 at 6:00 p.m. to April 20 at 5:59pm,  but the discussion boards will not be graded until after May 8th.
This page describes what you should do in this April session.    

Objectives of this session

  1. You should have a better idea of the process of policy practice.
  2. You should have an idea of how a bill gets passed and made into a law (act, ordinance, statute).
  3. You should understand the importance of expert testimony in meeting with legislatures or giving statements at hearings.
  4. You should understand how to give testimony or support for legislation.
  5. You should understand some of the political realities around how bills get passed.
  6. You should review policy options for the mock hearing.
  7. You should research your topic for the mock hearing.

Time Budget for 11 hours

3h 30m   Time spent on discussion boards.

30m     Pick a topic for your mock hearing.

2h    Read all you can about your topic for the mock hearing.

1h 30m     Read pages 14-43 in So, you Want to Make a Difference? Advocacy is the Key. By Nancy Amidei (2010).

35m     Listen to recording about homelessness in Springfield or the more recent talk by Josh Sabo from 2022. You do not need to listen to this, as you can read the transcript of the April 2022 talk as a Word Document or as a Pages file.

25m     Take quizzes in commemorative. Once you get good at them, take quizzes on canvas. Log in as a student (not a teacher) and try the quizzes in these three classrooms: IVES6583, ERIC5789, and ERIC1916

 

What will happen in the class meeting at the start of this session?

Here is what I would like to discuss at the start of this class session.

  • We would review how to make good advocacy talks to persuade people. What are some techniques of persuasion?
  • We would review the major legislative milestones in the history of child welfare policies.
  • I would probably talk for a bit, or give a presentation on the research on prevention programs for children and adolescents.
  • And then, I would talk about developmental assets, asset-based approach, and research on what promotes healthy development of children and adolescents.
  • We would briefly talk about how trauma-informed practice guides many services and programs now.
  • I would talk briefly about the process of assessing children for disabilities in schools, and the influence of the IDEA and ADA on school social work.
  • We might do some sort of simulation related to policy.

What must you read this week?

Nancy Amidei wrote So, you Want to Make a Difference? Advocacy is the Key as a guidebook for social workers to engage in policy practice. This week, in preparation for the mock hearing (and getting ready for the Macro Practice course you may be taking soon), I want you to read the second and third parts of the book. The book is not expensive, but since I'm only asking you to read pages 14-43 (out of 100 pages in the book), I will direct you to a PDF version of this reading:
Here is the first reading section (it is actually the second part of the book), a review of civics and the legislative process, as a pdf.
Here is the second reading section (the third part of the book), with more information about advocating for legislation and issues, as a pdf.

What must you watch this week?

Rather than watching something, you can listen to this 35 minute sound file of a recording from a meeting of the Greater Springfield Interfaith Association, when Josh Sabo was the speaker on the November 3rd general meeting. This is a discussion of homelessness. It is an MP4 (AAC) file. There is a more recent audio file that is more up-to-date, and maybe you should just listen to this one instead. It is also an MP4 (AAC) file. It may be better to simply read the transcript of the April 2022 talk and discussion Josh Sabo gave.

What are the discussion questions this week?

Discussion Question 1: 
Discussion Question 12-1: Check in.  Tell us how you are doing and what is going on in your life? Let us know how you are.

Discussion Question 2: 
Discussion Question 12-2: Some questions to help you prepare for the final exam.

1)  A single mother has one child and works 30 hours per week at about $13.90 per hour, earning $1,667 per month. This gives the small household an income of $20,000, which is about $3,700 above the poverty level for a two-person household. Yet, this family applies for EITC and SNAP. What, if any, is a plausible benefit level they might receive with SNAP and from the Federal EITC?

2) About how many American households will skip meals because they haven’t money to buy food, and how many will, at some point in a year, have someone in the household go all day without eating because they do not have enough money to buy food?

3) About how many Americans received an Earned Income Tax Credit in a typical recent year?

4) What are the five main civil rights laws passed between 1963 and 1990? (be able to list them)

5)  What is the Fair Market Rate housing price given by HUD in 2018 for a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago?

6) What is the Fair Market Rate housing price given by HUD in 2018 for a two-bedroom apartment in Springfield?

7) A married worker with two children at home has a job in a large manufacturing firm in Central Illinois. In the past 12 months, this worker earned $48,000 (a total of $24,000 in the last two quarters / six months). The worker gets laid off when the plant closes. The worker applies for Unemployment Insurance, and receives it for 22 weeks (about five months). During that time the worker seeks employment, but only gets one job offer, and that is for a job that pays $1,800 per month ($21,600 per year). What is the likely benefit amount this worker will have in the next month?

8) What is a good estimate for how many persons are killed by police action in a given year?

9) A single worker with no dependents at home has a job in a large manufacturing firm in Central Illinois. In the past 12 months, this worker earned $40,078 (a total of $20,078 in the last two quarters / six months). The worker gets laid off when the plant closes. The worker applies for Unemployment Insurance, and receives it for 22 weeks (about five months). During that time the worker seeks employment, but only gets one job offer, and that is for a job that pays $1,800 per month ($21,600 per year). What is the likely benefit amount this worker will have in the next month?

10) Since 1978, what government level has been responsible for Indian (American Indian) foster children?

Discussion Question 3: 
Discussion Question 12-3: Pick any of the milestones in the history of efforts to protect children from abuse. You can pick any you think are important, or use the list from the session eleven guide (starting with “homeless children in 19th century England and the United States” and going down to “2018, Family First Prevention Services Act.” Write a five sentence summary of the event and share it here, and then reflect on what that particular event or law shows us about the commitment of our society to protecting children.

Discussion Question 4: 
Discussion Question 12-4: What have you been learning about the topic you will be using as your issue in the mock hearing on December 2nd?

Discussion Question 5: 
Discussion Question 12-5: What side will you take on your topic in the mock hearing? Are you in favor, or opposed to the idea you will be advocating in the mock hearing? Now, from your understanding, what is the best argument on the other side of your position? That is, if you were fair-minded and unbiased, and someone asked you, “what are the best arguments or facts or reasons for supporting or opposing?” what answer would you give for the position that is opposing the position you will take in the mock hearing? And, I understand that you may think the “best” argument against your position is still very weak.

Discussion Question 6: 
Discussion Question 12-6: What makes a policy good? What criteria do you use to consider whether a policy is worth supporting? For example, you might mention some of the following: is it effective and doing what needs to be done? Is it efficient and doing what needs to be done in a way that is cost-effective and reasonable? Is it manifesting our values such as our commitment to human rights and social justice? Is this policy adequate? If the policy is inadequate, would opposing it help us get a better policy, or is the only feasible alternative to this policy something worse? Will this policy be sustainable in the long-run? Does this policy promote the dignity and worth of the persons involved? Is this policy or service fair enough, and is the degree of unfairness justifiable? (All policies and services require time or money, and people must be asked—or coerced— to hand over time/money to support the costs of policies and services, so to some degree there may be a bit of unfairness in almost any policy, so the question is really more of “is it too unfair?” rather than “is there any unfairness to this?”)

Discussion Question 7: 
Discussion Question 12-7: What is your impression of Josh Sabo from the audio recording of (an excerpt from) his talk with the Greater Springfield Interfaith Association? Does he seem to be knowledgeable and professional? As he explained some of the situation in Springfield and answered questions, what is your impression of what must be done in Springfield to end homelessness, and do you feel any hope that our community might make some major gains in decreasing homelessness? Mayor Langfelder seems very committed to increasing the city’s efforts to solve the homelessness problem (he wanted and got $500,000 for city spending on homelessness in a recent city budget, when the previous allocation had been $250,000 or less for years).

Discussion Question 8:

Discussion Question 12-8: In some fields, such as psychology or counseling, the professions do not require their practitioners to know so much about social welfare policies. Social work is distinguished by its emphasis on the goal of ensuring that all professionals in our field are knowledgeable about public services and all of us remain engaged in advocating for the services that will be most helpful to our clients and most in keeping with our understanding of core social work values. Nancy Amidei, who wrote the chapters you read from Advocacy is the Key, sets out some ideas for how much engagement we should have in the political practice (communicating regularly with elected officials, for example). What is your reaction to her suggestions and expectations? Do they seem excessive? Are you motivated or inspired by her suggestions? Inspired or motivated enough to actually making political practice part of your professional life?

Activities

Here is what I expect you to do this week

  1. Read and post in the discussion board for about three hours this week.
  2. Read pages 14-43 in So, you Want to Make a Difference? Advocacy is the Key by Nancy Amidei
  3. Your other task is to read all you can find about your topic for the mock hearing (use a couple hours for this). What you will read will depend upon your topic. There are a dozen topics each semester that students can choose from to make their mock hearing appeals. Here is the list:

    1) Give testimony for a bill or law that gives social work internships that pay stipends to the students. This could be done based on the existing Act 101-0558. Essentially, make the case that the Federal Government should provide grants to the states, or the states should provide grants to their universities and human service agencies, so that college students and graduate students who do internships with public entities such as the Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) or other entities (Area Agency on Aging, Illinois Human Rights Commission, Jails and Penitentiaries, the Department of Mental Health) will be paid a stipend covering their tuition and some living expenses while doing their internships. You can base your testimony on an existing bill (pretending it hasn’t passed and advocating for it), or recommend increasing funding or expanding a program in an existing law or bill, or you can make up a your own policy or bill that is plausible, and we will pretend it has become a bill being considered in a legislative committee, and you can explain in an overview what it would do.

    2) Give testimony about an act to support Telehealth so that social workers can see clients with computer interfaces instead of meeting face-to-face. Look at House Resolution 7663, for an example of this sort of bill.

    3) Give testimony about a law in the state that will increase funding for substance abuse detoxification and treatment, and distribute it regionally by county so that every county (even rural ones) will have some treatments for substance abuse/addiction detoxification and recovery.

    4) Pretend that you are seeking support for a bill to make the workplaces safer for social workers and nurses and so forth. This could be like the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act.

    5) Give testimony about a law or policy to create safe schools and healthy learning environments. This could be something like Public Act 101-0438, which set up a system of grants for schools to use; schools had to apply for these grants and had to present plans in order to qualify. You can imagine that you are advocating for that specific law, or think of some other policy that would make schools safer and healthier places for students.

    6) Pretend that you are going to the city council to appeal for the city to create a coalition with the school districts and local youth-service agencies and charities to encourage more extracurricular involvement by students from areas of high poverty and school drop-out. This might be a way to collect resources, make a list of approved extracurricular activities and groups, and reward families if their children regularly attend these extracurricular activities. The policy would make these activities free to students from families with qualifying (low) incomes, and would reward students with some sort of graduation grant to help with college, trade school, community college, or creating a business. At any rate, think of how to collect resources and make them available to low-income and minority students (possibly to all students).

    7) Pretend you are going before the city council to appeal for more money to go social workers and other mental health specialists within the police force or in association with the police force.

    8) Pretend you are going before the city council to appeal for more money to go into services that would pretty much end homelessness.

    9) Imagine you are testifying about the Violence Against Women and Children Act, 2019 Reauthorization, H.R. 1585

    10) Testify about a scheme to provide universal health care.

    11) Testify about a policy to provide parental leave for post-natal care. This would be a parental leave for parents of young children.

    12) Testify in favor of a healthy workplace act (paid sick leave).

  4. Listen to this recording of a meeting with the director of the Heartland Continuum of Care, Josh Sabo.
  5. Work on writing your third policy paper, which is due at the end of the next session.

Mock Hearing

The Mock Hearing is approaching. Spend time preparing for the mock hearing.

Each person in your group must speak, probably for two or three minutes at least. You should, as a group, prepare a description of the problem, and a moral statement or value statement that explains why the current situation is morally wrong. You should then provide a mix of individual stories or anecdotes that illustrate the problems with the existing situation and how the proposed legislation would be an improvement. You also need to balance the narratives and cases with some facts and figures to show that you know the scope of the problem. Alternatively, you can approach this other way, and give testimony opposed to the proposed policy.

There will always be questions about costs. You need to know about the costs of your policy, or the costs that will be reduced by your policy. You need to have some sort of estimate of actual dollar amounts, and you need to be able to briefly explain where your estimates of dollar amounts come from.

You need to have an idea of how your policy will be administered. What existing departments will handle it? Who will be responsible? Are you adding a work burden on people who are already handling many things, or are you proposing that more staff will be hired to cope with any extra work required by the passage of your bill?

What about the costs to pay for your bill? Are you proposing an increase in taxes or fees? Which taxes or fees? How much of an increase?

Each person ought to pretend that they are social workers from agencies. You can make up agencies, interest groups, and generally play "make-believe" with your backgrounds, or you can look up actual people who support or oppose your legislation and model your mock hearing identity around those real persons. Alternatively, you could pretend to be a client, and give a story about how you needed whatever is proposed in the legislation.

More guidance:

1) Each person on your team must pretend to be an expert of some sort who has come to speak to a committee hearing about a policy. You may pretend to be clients, social workers, agency directors, researchers, representatives of advocacy organizations, or a representative of any sort of stakeholder group involved with your policy.

2) Part of your score is based on how well you role-play as the person you are pretending to be.

3) Each person on your team should be able to speak for three to five minutes about the policy position you are taking. It is fine (encouraged) for you to have team members who both support and oppose the policy, but it okay if everyone takes the same position (support or opposition) on a policy.

4) You ought to prepare your remarks, possibly writing them down so you could read them (sometimes experts do read from scripts when they speak at committee hearings)

5) You should highlight personal experiences and anecdotes. Someone on your team ought to present facts and figures, and all of you could offer some facts and figures, but remember the value of good examples stories that use narrative and moral language.

6) You should all prepare for likely questions. Anticipate questions about obvious things like: "how much will this policy cost us?" or questions rooted in traditional liberal or conservative biases.

7) Remember the likely ideological approaches of those who will be asking you questions about the policy. Be ready to show that the policy takes care of people and doesn't do harm, is promoting justice and fairness, rewards respect for authority, rewards purity, rewards loyalty, encourages liberty, and does not seem wasteful or destructive. Be able to us the nurturing parent metaphors or the disciplinarian father metaphors that Lakoff suggests are at the foundation of liberal and conservative ideologies.

8) We will go over likely questions you may face before you do your hearing. Prepare for the questions we have determined will be asked of your team. You may not get the exact specific questions that were considered, but almost all your questions should be closely related to the questions we identified before your presented your policy at the hearing.

9) You also need to prepare questions you will ask of the team that presents when you are in the audience. When you are in the audience, you must role-play that you are a senator or representative, or that you are on some board or committee that has power to set policy or shape services.

10) You need to be an expert on the policy you are discussing in the hearing. You ought to give five or six hours of your time to reading about it, and devote another two or three hours to writing out notes, thinking about what you will say, and preparing your remarks. Take this seriously. It's an important part of the class.

11) On the day of the hearings you must not be absent. If you miss the hearing, this can harm your grade for the class.

12) You must participate when your team is speaking. If most people are giving 3-minute to 5-minute presentations with a mix of good information in the shape of statistics and facts as well as compelling stories and anecdotes, but then you speak for only one minute and say only vague general things about the policy, you will not get a good score on this mock hearing.

13) You may invent anecdotes and stories. It is not necessary for this role-playing mock hearing that you stick to the facts when you give anecdotal stories to illustrate the policy. On the other hand, if you are presenting an actual policy, your facts and figures must be accurate, and you must be able to identify where your facts and figures are coming from.

14) The mock hearing is widely praised by students in their end-of-semester self evaluations. Please enjoy this and get into the spirit of pretending you are a real expert on the policy. After putting about 4 or 5 hours into your preparation you will have more expertise on the policy than most people, so please feel confident about this.

 

Evaluating your mock hearing

This is the rubric I use when I evaluate the participation you show in the mock hearing:
1) Does the student demonstrate some basic concepts of policy practice in the way they make their argument, for example, do they:
respectfully introduce themselves to the distinguished audience?
make a request, urging a specific action?
offer facts and information to support their position?
offer moral argument or values to support their position?
provide a narrative story to explain the issue?
use words (frames) that are likely to trigger the sort of associations they hope to inspire opposition to ideas they oppose or support for ideas they support?
frame their argument to persuade the persuadable rather than preaching to those who already are likely to agree?
show by their speaking (or reading, if they read their statement) that they have prepared for this, and know something about what they are talking about?
Show by their speaking that they are familiar with policy and services in general?

2) Does the student take on a role, and stay within that role during the mock hearing? If a student breaks out of the role and stops pretending to be the expert during the hearing, that is not good.

3) Has the student thought creatively about the problem, and come up with some answers to obvious questions (how much will this cost?, etc.)

4) The group as a whole is evaluated to see if everything was covered: it is quite likely that one person on a team will role-play a person who needs the policy or service, and they will probably give an anecdote or story, and make a moral argument, while someone else may play a technical expert, who will explain how the services or policy would work, and another person might give many statistics and numbers and so forth, so it is expected that each student may only cover a fraction of what we want, but so long as each student seems well-prepared, knows what they are talking about, and stays in the role-play, and the group as a whole touches the main things that obviously would help, then each member may expect about 18 points.

12-14 points: the student tried, but clearly did not put enough time into this, did not think it through, and did not really get into their role, but there seems to have been a good-faith effort, and the student has demonstrated at least a minimal grasp on the principles of policy practice and policy-making.

15-16 points: The student did fine, and I have no doubt that they know how to do policy practice, an can discuss policy intelligently. They clearly know what they are doing. The overall performance was okay, and no major problems marred their role-play. There may be mistakes, and they may not have done all that I wanted, but they mostly got the job done, and that is good.

17-18 points: A very solid performance. Student obviously put a lot of thought and effort into this, and played their role well. They knew what they were talking about, and was genuinely impressed.

19-20 points: This performance was good enough for this student to join the NASW advocacy crew and give testimony in the statehouse. A memorable performance. A 20 is as good or better than I could do at this.

Interesting Stuff To Explore

Here are some links and resources for each of the 12 possible mock hearing topics. You can go out and do your own research, of course, and that is what I expect, but these few links will get you started.

Internships that would get a stipend for social work students

Supporting Telehealth.

Statewide funding so detoxification and substance addiction recovery can be in every county of the state

Some notes from a previous group that was going to do this:

Detox Centers and Treatment Programs in Illinois.
Every incorporated city with a population over 50,000 must have a detox center with at least two spaces/beds for every 10,000 persons.
There should be services for persons going through detox, enumerated in this bill:
1) Mentoring and life coaching
2) Group therapy
Group therapy provided by social workers, psychologists, licensed counselors, or psychiatrists
Life Coaches have caseloads of 11-22, never more than 25.
Costs shared between cities and state government. About 50/50

Questions to answer:
The cost of this program.
What does it cost to run a detox center?
Who staffs the detox center? How is this regulated? Who checks?
What happens to a city if it fails to comply?
How many life coaches would we need to hire in this state?
What will the salaries be for the life coaches?
What are the qualifications of the life coaches?
What are the aftercare and discharge planning services like? Who provides those?
How long will people be in the detox facility?
This bill is for persons who are detoxification services for 2-10 days.

Addressing the overdose crisis.
How many of the overdoses are from prescribed medications, and how many are from consuming street drugs that enter the market illegally without anyone ever writing a prescription?
Do we need to address doctors and pharmacies and drug treatment, or is this more of an issue concerning drug gangs and drug lords putting substances on the streets?
How much will it cost?
We need to address the problem of over-prescribed medication. We are going to target the doctors with this policy.
We want to promote alternatives to opioid pain medications.
We want to allow responsible doctors and patients who really need these opioid pain medications to continue using them.
System to check on drug use and refills.

Protection for social workers from violence in the workplace.

Create safe schools and healthy learning environments

Trying to address injustice in Springfield by giving more attention to K-12 students

I wrote this to help a group of students who were thinking about how to do this with an extracurricular activity program:

Check out the Springfield City budget:
 https://www.springfield.il.us/Government/2020/FY2021AnnualAppropriation.pdf

The city was expecting $91 million from local taxes ($23 million from property taxes, $29 million from state sales taxes, and $32 million from local sales tax, and the rest from various other taxes).  We expected about $18.5 million from statewide taxes (about $12.5 million would come from state income taxes).  There are also many different types of fees, fines, and licenses.

The total revenue is $130 million.

Running the library costs about $4.8 million.

Running the Oak Ridge Cemetery costs about $1.6. million.

Running our sewer system costs about $10.8 million.

Running the fire department costs about $42 million (and that is not counting health insurance or retirement benefits for the fire protection workers)

Running the police department costs about $50 million (again, not including health insurance and pension fund contributions)

The total for Community Development Block Grants is about $2 million.

Springfield School District 186 runs 22 elementary and preschools, 6 middle schools, 3 high schools, and 1 learning center, and spends about $280 million each year to do this https://www.sps186.org/downloads/table/133214/2018%20CAFR%20.pdf. 

Capital Area Career Center runs on a budget of about $5.7 million http://www.capital.tec.il.us/docs/FY20_Amended_Budget_Summary.pdf 

Lincoln Land Community College runs on an annual budget of about $46.6 million dollars. https://www.llcc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/FY20-FINAL-BUDGET.pdf

Illinois Statues tell us that: …Each school board shall annually prepare a calendar for the school term, specifying the opening and closing dates and providing a minimum term of at least 185 days to insure 176 days of actual pupil attendance…. (105 ILCS 5/10-19) (from Ch. 122, par. 10-19).

The teachers who work in School District 186 will not generally have time or interest in working in the after-school and summer programs. A few will, but most of the paid staff will need to come from other sources. 

The rate for teachers (if paid hourly) is about $30.  Educational professionals without teaching licenses, but with other types of certifications (with college degrees) are generally paid about $24-$25 per hour.  You may be able to hire other staff for as little as $19-$20 per hour.

You might design a program around the idea that you will have many volunteers.  You might expect a ratio of two adult volunteers to each paid staff person, and perhaps an additional LLCC or UIS student per each paid worker.

If you are offering enrichment programming to supplement school courses, such as extracurricular programming, you will not want to compete with the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Urban League, Scouting, the YMCA, and other such established organizations.  You will want to offer things that they are not offering, add to what they are offering, work within those organizations, or at the very least coordinate and cooperate with them.  Those organizations are well-connected with local power elites. The people in those organizations and their sponsors will mostly work as allies and want you to succeed, so long as you are not displacing them or presenting yourself as something better than what they are doing.  That is, most of the staff and donors who support existing extracurricular activities genuinely are motivated by the interests of the children they are serving, but they also have some loyalty to the approach and group through which they offer their services.

The city already has a parks and recreation department. The police department has a summer camp (targeted at children living in public housing). These public expenditures already so something similar to what you want, but you might point out that your program would try to coordinate all existing programs within an umbrella, putting together what is done by the library, the parks and recreation department, various youth recreational sports clubs and leagues, the Capital Area Career Center, The Urban League’s 21st Century program, the NAACP’s summer Freedom School, and so forth, and offers services and programs that fill gaps, or help some students get into these programs (because their families have trouble transporting them, or paying the very modest fees that exist for the existing programs).  The key is to suggest that you will try to promote increased involvement in all these existing programs and offer additional programs where we have no existing programs. You will remove barriers that prevent children and youth from participating in existing programs and add additional programs that do not exist.  Some of these additional programs will be added by your staff (105 school-year employees; 5 year-round employees; 18 summer employees).  In other cases your staff will and volunteers will work with existing organizations to offer new programs. In other cases your staff will help recruit more children and youth and facilitate entry of these students into existing programming that has the capacity to handle more youth involvement. 

The idea is to add 1-5 hours of after-school programing free-of-fees for any student (including home-schooled or private-schooled) children.  The other idea is to offer summer programming for up to 34 days (7 weeks) in additional programming.  To some extent, you want to be offering career training that supplements or prepares young persons for the sort of things they could do at the Capital Area Career Center.  But, you also want to be offering sports and games, hobby-style clubs, citizenship and service clubs, special interest training (in music, art, drama, animals, etc.).  You want to use existing assets and resources in our community (the zoo, local dance studios, local music teachers, and so forth). 

To cover that range of programming, you might offer two or three different programs in after-school clubs that meet Mondays through Fridays (expect lower attendance on Fridays).  So, you need three or four paid persons at each site with expertise in each area (sports, games, special interests, citizenship and service, etc.)  Possibly curricula could be created that relied on local professionals (restaurant chefs, farmers, law enforcement professionals, lawyers, state government workers, journalists, business owners, engineers, carpenters, doctors, nurses, technicians, artists) and members of local clubs (gardeners, bird watching clubs, caving grottos, sports clubs) to provide a finite portion of the training and supervision in the after-school or summer programs.  That is, a law firm might commit to getting lawyers or law clerks to two local schools for six days of afternoon programming each year (12 total afternoons of service) and three days of training and work in summer classes.  In this way, much of the work of staffing the supplemental programming could be distributed around the community, creating greater commitment to the program. 

Afternoon programming (paid for 5 hours per word day; 160 work days; total of 800 hours per year):  $24,000 annual salary for person with teacher qualification; $20,000 for qualified college graduate; $16,000 for skilled non-college graduate.  Actual cost of employment (retirement and health insurance benefits included, and Social Security and Medicare taxes) would be about $40,000, $36,000, and $32,000.  

3 paid staff per elementary school.

4 paid staff per middle school.

6 paid staff per high school.

5 supervisor/administrator/accountant types working year-round full-time with two at $60,000 and three at $45,000 ($90,000 and $70,000 labor costs after benefits) 

I’m calculating a labor cost with this level of paid staffing of $4.146 million. 


Summer programming:

Assume 18 paid staff for seven weeks.  300 hours of labor (including some preparation days before classes start and a day of paid holiday on July 4th) 

6 at $10,000 (no health benefits, but retirement, Social Security, and Medicare contributions made, so actual labor cost of $11,800)

6 at $8,000 (actual labor cost of $9,450)

6 at $5,500 (actual labor cost of $6,500)
Labor cost for summer program of $166,500


Total labor costs of program: $4.3 million (approximately).

Assume materials and overhead and so forth to be half of labor costs: $2.2 million

Total program cost $6.5 million.


Sources of revenue:

State grant for an experimental program to last for five years.

School budget allocation.

City budget allocation.

Federal grant.

Fundraising through United Way

Special increase in property tax working out to $5 per month per homeowner.


There are about 50,000 households in Springfield.  A $60 tax per household would raise $3 million.

The city might be able to allocate $800,000.

The School District might be able to allocate $2 million.

Local fundraising to support this program might raise $100,000 per year.

We would rely on foundations and state and government grants for $600,000 per year. 

So, you might be asking the city to put $800,000 toward this, and also get a local tax on the ballot for a household tax that would raise on average $60 per household per year. Some households might pay almost nothing; wealthy households might pay $120 per year, but the average would target about $5 per month per household.  

Social Workers in the Police

Imagine you are speaking at the Springfield City Council during their budget hearing, and advocating for the city to earmark $1-$2 million of the city’s $130 million expenditure to hire police social workers or to get a contract with a mental health agency to provide mental health assistance. These social workers or mental health partners with the police would go to domestic disturbances, wellness checks, mental health crisis situations, suicidal persons, and persons who were psychotic or intoxicated. They would also be specialists in community relations. They would help giving news about terrible accidents or deaths to family and friends. They would do victim services and referrals. They would not provide counseling to police, but the money could be used to create a contract with a mental health entity that would provide six mental wellness checks and counseling sessions with all uniformed officers each year. How many social workers could we hire with that much money, and how much would a contract for six hours of mandatory counseling / wellness checks for all officers per year cost? Find out how many police are on the force. How many retire in a typical year?

Read about the Springfield Police Department’s pledge for professionalism.

Talk to someone in our criminology department about what they think we ought to do. Ryan Williams (a UIS professor) says we are not getting a good return on investment in current approaches to policing.

Consider the bill proposed by Jaime M. Andrade, Jr (it will probably be re-introduced in the next State General Assembly) to require a social work major or minor be earned by every probation officer! This is HB5810.

Check out what Ald. Gregory (Ward 2) and Ald. Turner (Ward 3) have proposed for the Springfield Police Department.

The budget for FY 2021 in the city of Springfield included $82,000 for the “coordinator” position, which is essentially a social worker to be hired (possibly already hired, you could ask Chief Winslow—he is very approachable and friendly) to do more of the work that the homeless outreach team officer Chris Jones has been doing. I was at the city council meeting where the “coordinator” position was debated and discussed, so I know the intention was that this would be a social worker. Ask Chris Jones if he could talk to you briefly about the idea of hiring social workers in the police department, and listen to what he tells you.

Learn about the Cahoots project in Eugene and Springfield (Oregon) by reading this description from the clinic that provides the mental health services, or this description from the Eugene Police Department (in Oregon), which has links to about six good journalist sources describing what they are doing. Or, listen to this 4-minute report from NPR (June 2020) about Cahoots.

Social workers on the police force in Alexandria, Kentucky have made a positive difference in the community, according to David Mattingly.

Also from the summer of 2020, read Emma Coleman's article from Route Fifty (reprinted in Ms., I can't find the original source in Route Fifty). Check out the article in Vice News about replacing police with professionals who didn't carry guns (such as social workers). Some on the radical wing of our profession do not like the idea of social worker police officers. Jonathan Foiles, agrees, saying swapping social workers in for police will not solve the policing and crime problems we have (he is a professor of social work at the University of Chicago).

End Homelessness in Springfield, Illinois

The budget for FY 2001 is supposed to double the money to address homelessness (Mayor Langfelder wanted $500,000 devoted to the problem, instead of the $250,000). Much of that money is supposed to be given out in community development block grants. So, imagine you are either applying for some of that money to do something, or that you are suggesting a bigger project that would require even more money out of the city budget (a three-year commitment to devote $1 million to the problem with the likely end result that in three years we have eliminated homelessness and can go back to funding the problem at $250,000 per year might get a receptive hearing, if you have a reasonable plan).

Just about everything you need to know about local homelessness issues can be found at the website of the Heartland Continuum of Care.

Ideas about what can end homelessness are also available from many other sources, including the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and the Melville Charitable Trust.

The Violence Against Women and Children Act

Imagine you are testifying about the Violence Against Women and Children Act, 2019 Reauthorization, H.R. 1585, or something like it.

The National Congress of American Indians was in favor of this, and so was the American Bar Association, and so was the Center for American Progress, but it was never passed in the Senate (thanks to the efforts of Mitch McConnell to block it).. A few journalists have looked into this, such as Jay Willis at GQ, and Matt Laslo at Vice News, and Jordain Carney at The Hill.

Universal health care.

Jon Perr at Daily Kos (biased liberal source) using data from 4 years ago or earlier wrote about Universal Health Care in April, 2017.

Amartya Sen (academic and technical expert source) wrote an editorial in May of 2015 advocating for Universal Health Care in Harvard Public Health Review.

In the same May 2015 issue of Harvard Public Health Review, another academic and technical expert, Tsung-Mei Cheng explains the implications of the Universal Health Care Lessons from Asian countries.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (nonpartisan technical expert source) provides a way to compare various health care reform plans side-by-side across a long list of issues and policy choices.

Asa Ebba Cristina Laurell (academic/technical expert) provided in a March 2016 issue of Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem an English-language article comparing insurance against universal public systems.

Gerald Friedman (economics professor, technical expert) offered an argument at the Healthcare-NOW! website (biased liberal advocacy group) in favor of Universal Health Care.

A group of conservative scholars (technical experts) working for conservative think tanks (biased conservative advocacy groups) run Health Affairs Blog and have provided a thoughtful agenda for improving health care.

Michael D. Tanner (a right wing hack) wrote an editorial for the National Review (biased conservative source) picked up by the CATO institute (biased libertarian advocacy group) in which he opposed universal health care.

Joe Messerli of BalancedPolitics.org (technocratic fairly nonpartisan source) offers the main points generally made for and against universal health care.

Parental leave for post-natal care.

Prachi Gupta in September of 2016 in Cosmopolitan (Conde Nast publishing has a liberal bias reflected in this source) interviewed Ivanka Trump on the Trump New Child Care and Maternity Leave Policy.

Hannah Levintova in April of 2017 in Mother Jones (liberal biased source) reports on a White House executive order and its influence on maternity leave policies.

Department of Labor (technocratic and unbiased source) provides information on the existing Family & Medical Leave Act.

U.S. News and World Report (fairly unbiased middle-of-the-road mainstream journalism) offered a list of six things people need to know about the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The Atlantic Monthly (high quality journalism and relatively unbiased) offers a map of maternity leave policies around the world.

A report from 2012 (pdf) on state laws that help new parents. From the National Partnership for Women and Families (source is biased in favor of family leave).

Back in September of 2016, Gretchen Livingston of Pew Research (high quality unbiased research from a technocratic think tank) compared the USA to 40 other countries in paid parental leave policies.

Chris Weller at Business Insider (liberal bias in this fairly mainstream journalistic source) compares ten of the best parental leave policies in the world (back in August of 2016).

Why do we not have a paid family leave policy in the USA? Back in 2009 Nita Ghei of the CATO Institute (very biased libertarian conservative think tank with record of bad scholarship) made the case against paid family leave.

Foundation for Economic Education (I was formerly a dues-paying member, this is a think tank with a strong libertarian conservative bias) has Nicole Kaeding argue that paid family leave laws often backfire.

Russell Berman in August of 2016 in the Atlantic (high quality journalism and relatively unbiased) reported on a conservative push for paid family leave made by the American Action Forum.

Center for American Progress (liberal bias) writers Kaitlin Holmes and Sarah Jane Glynn explain paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, and various policy options.

An undergraduate student at MIT (Kathleen Xu) wrote a good essay on family leave. This is the level of writing and research I expect from all my BSW students at UIS.

Here are some notes from a previous group that did this:

How many people does it cover?
Who is covered? Men? Women? Both partners if married? If not married?
Employed full-time or part-time?
Employer covers, or federal government covers, or who covers?
Birth of child; adoption of child; sick leave?


Testify in favor of a healthy workplace act (paid sick leave).

Paid sick leave and HB 2771 & SB 1296.

Seyfarth Shaw and associates run a website for management law advice (bias is pro-management, anti-worker), and they report basic facts about the Healthy Workplace Act.

The National Federation of Independent Business (bias is pro-owner, anti-worker) is taking an advocacy position against HB 2771.

Michael J. Soltis (corporate pro-business lawyer with anti-worker bias) has a blog devoted entirely to paid sick leave.

Associated Builders and Contractors (extreme pro-business and anti-worker bias) lists HB 2771 as one of several “anti-business” measures in the 100th General Assembly.

Jackson & Lewis law firm (authors Jody Kahn Mason and Kathryn Montgomery Moran) describe the new Employee Sick Leave Act that was passed in the summer of 2016, and took effect on January 1st of 2017.

Short list of current Employee Sick Leave Act rules.

Lori Deem of Outten & Golden LLP explains some of the benefits and drawbacks to the new Employee Sick Leave Act that went into effect in 2017.

Points in favor (pdf) of the proposed Paid Sick Leave Act (HB 2771) from the Illinois Women Moving Forward advocacy group (bias is pro-worker and anti-business owner).

AFL-CIO (pro-worker, anti-business bias) describes why paid sick days are necessary, according to their point-of-view.

The SB-1296 sponsor Toi Hutchinson had a staff person (Drew Hill) write about the passage of the bill through the Senate Labor Committee (next step, it goes to the floor of the Senate).