Western Regional Meeting Report

Submitted by: Mary Rawlings, MSW

The Regional Meeting for the Western States was well attended by members across the region with exciting discussion. The meeting focused on updates from the various schools. Common themes and concerns emerged in the discussion.

Concern was expressed that there are advanced standing programs requiring MSW supervision in the BSW field internship as part of admission. This creates a hardship for programs in rural and remote areas, which have few MSWs and may be using BSWs to supervise their students, an option which is permissible in the standards. This concern was passed onto the continuum committee with a request to explore the extent of this. A related concern was the lack of clarity in EPAS regarding advanced standing program requirements. Several schools with combined programs also noted the inconsistency in BSW preparation, with some students well prepared for advanced standing and others not.

Distance education is also being implemented and explored for BSW education, in particular in the rural and remote locations of the country as a way to increase access, ie Alaska, Hawaii, and Wyoming.

Frustration was expressed related to the lack of flexibility in current EPAS standards that do not allow for programs to be creative in meeting the unique needs of their programs. For example, Guam has a growing BSW program, and would like to explore developing an advanced standing only MSW.  The emphasis in hiring Ph.D faculty and the shortage of such qualified persons was also discussed.

Finally, in general, the BSW programs represented were growing and doing well. Oregon, in particular, has several new BSW programs in process of development, when for many years, there was only one program in the state.