Funding for classes is provided by SRS. All classes are free to anyone who wants to take them who lives in the State of Kansas.

The Children's Alliance of Kansas strives to improve the quality of life for children and families by providing training and education for foster families, adoptive families, residential childcare workers and supervisors, social workers and other professionals in the child welfare field.

The Children's Alliance, under a contract with SRS Commission of Children and Family Services, offers trainings through the courtesy of child placing member agencies. The trainings are provided at a minimal cost - primarily to direct line staff workers as well as foster and adoptive parents - but are open to anyone. Childcare is not provided unless noted on a particular listing.

The Training Project funding was originally provided to the Alliance in 1998, for the purpose of providing training for child welfare agency staff, as well as foster and adoptive parents. In Kansas, licensed foster parents are required to have from 16 to 60 continuing education units (CEU's) annually, depending upon the severity of the special needs of the foster children in their care. The amount of funding provided by SRS was increased in 1999. This project has two components:

• Model Approach to Partnership in Parenting (MAPP) and related services, which is required pre-service training for all licensed foster parents in the state.
• agency training for child care workers/supervisors, foster parents and adoptive parents.

There are a limited number of spaces available for registrations outside the sponsoring agency. Any remaining spaces are turned back over to the sponsoring agency one week prior to the scheduled date of training. Therefore, please register no later than one week before the scheduled date of training. Registrations can be done by phone, fax, email or online.
All child-placing agencies in the state of Kansas are encouraged to apply to the Children's Alliance to have trainings funded and published on the calendar. To be eligible, the training must be best practice instruction (not agency-specific content) appropriate for foster and adoptive parents, residential childcare workers and supervisors or other professionals in the field, and must directly relate to one or more of the Eight Core Values of the Alliance. Please contact Denise Gibson, for further information about the application procedure.

Certification
The Children's Alliance of Kansas is pleased to provide the Residential Child Care Worker Certification program through the National Resource Center for Youth Services at the University of Oklahoma. This program is designed to help improve the quality of residential and foster care for children and youth by strengthening the skills of persons who are responsible for the daily nurturing, care and discipline of children placed in residential facilities as well as foster homes. This program provides a training opportunity to contribute to their professional growth and development.

The curriculum consists of the following five components:

• Building Relationships (12 hours)
• Teaching Discipline (12 hours)
• Creating a Positive Environment (6 hours)
• Understanding Child Development (12 hours)
• Becoming a Supervisor (6 hours)
  

These trainings are titled on the calendar as NRC CERT: followed by the name of the individual module being presented. Upon completion of all five modules, a written test will be administered for a fee of $25 and the certification will be issued through the University of Oklahoma. The Children's Alliance will provide the set of five books ($65) to participants who are committed to completing this process and becoming certified within 18 months. It is recommended that the classes be taken in the order listed but missed classes may be picked up at an alternate location by checking the calendar. We are currently offering this program in Olathe, Wichita, Great Bend and Salina. Please call Denise Gibson at (785)235-5437 or e-mail: dgibson@childally.org if you have further questions.

On-Line Training
In an on-going effort to be responsive to the needs of our member agencies and their employees, the Children's Alliance has developed several online courses intended primarily for our target audience of foster/adoptive parents and residential childcare workers and supervisors. These courses are designed to meet licensing requirements, but are also useful to a wide variety of individuals who work with children and youth in the state of Kansas. The four current courses are:

• Deciding Together Leader Training
• Understanding Loss and Attachment
• Child Abuse/Neglect Recognition and Reporting
• Ethics / Confidentiality

These courses are high quality Offerings with online instructors who are available to guide the participants through the completion of the course requirements. The content of each course has been repurposed to take advantage of the unique strengths of the Internet while maintaining the communication exchange of a live class. For some courses, the amount of credit available varies depending upon the level each student decides to pursue at the beginning of the course. It is approximately equivalent to the projected amount of time necessary to complete the course work assigned by the instructor. Our goal has been to make these Offerings as close as possible to the current clock/seat hours system, while recognizing that these courses are more closely related to a college credit system.

There is typically a limit of 20 registrants per course. As always, they will be processed on a first-come-first-served basis. Depending upon the response, other courses may be developed and posted to the Internet as well.