NASW Social Work Talks - EP14: School Social Work with author Brenda Wade

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

For Brenda Wade, MSW, LCSW-C, CSSW, writing is both a means of self-care both and as a way to explore the challenges that she sees in her work as a school social worker.  Published under the pen name Hunter William, Wade's Charm Town fiction trilogy shines a spotlight on the lives of children and adults in a Baltimore school. See the EP14 show notes for resources

From the National Association of Social Workers, I'm Aaliyah Wright, and this is Social Work Talks. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Today we're discussing school social work from the perspective of Charmtown author and NASW member Brenda Wade. A Maryland-born and raised crime fiction novelist, Wade, who writes under the pen name Hunter William, is also a 20-year advocate for children and families. Working with children presents its own set of rewards and unique challenges as witnessed by Peyton Stanfield, the main character in Wade's fictional crime series, Charmtown. Brenda, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Can you tell us a little about your background, how long you've been a social worker, and what drew you to social work and to writing? So I've been a social worker for a little over 20 years now. I absolutely love being a social worker. It's been the best professional decision that I could have made. I have had the unique opportunity to work in different settings and work with different populations and see people get to places where they want to be, where they weren't necessarily in the beginning. And I just love having the opportunity to impact other people's lives.

And what drew you to writing? So I started writing when I was a teenager in high school. And I started with just a journal. I had a journal, and I just would be in my room because I was the only girl in my family, so my brothers would be outside playing, and I used to love to read, and I would read mystery novels all the time. So I read all the Nancy Drew series and Alfred Hitchcock and Hardy Boys, and I was just really always interested in mystery,

and I would always jot down sort of what I was feeling on a particular day or if something had happened in my life and just kind of a way to express my thoughts and put things down. And so I found that I was interested in that, and I carried that through in college. I started writing short stories, never shared that with anyone, just kept my little journal and continued through when I was in graduate school, just doing short stories. And I've always just done them over the years, and it wasn't until probably about almost 10 years ago now that a friend of mine who's also a writer suggested that I think about publishing and so I wrote professionally prior for a non-profit organization so I was writing funding grants

and proposals and things like that but I really my my love was really in writing fiction. Did you always see yourself having a career in schools working with students? I knew I wanted to work with young people. I wasn't quite sure in what setting initially, although one of my first jobs actually in working what I would call with individuals was at a school here in Washington, D.C. called the Kingsbury Center. And so that is a school, but it's also an organization that does a lot of psychological testing and evaluations for young people who have disabilities. And so I really liked the school part. I was interested in that side of things. And then when I graduated from Howard University, I received my master's of social work degree there. I was accepted into a

postgraduate clinical fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine at their child study center. And I chose children and family and I was placed in schools as part of my externship there. And that's where the interest really sparked. And I knew I wanted to work in the school setting and the rest as they say is history and the rest they say is history now tell us a little bit about each of your books in this series and where people can find them well first you can find the books on amazon um you can also go to my website which is www.authorhunterwilliam.com there's no s at the end it's it's hunterwilliam.com also on um barnes and noble so the series will be three, there'll be three books in the series, and then a spinoff to the series. Books one and two

are out. Book three is due out early next year, fingers crossed. It is a story about what happens to young people in urban school settings. And I chose to do my first project in the school setting because I've been very familiar with working in schools and very familiar with young people. But I also wanted to tell the story of the young people who go to school in urban settings and what their individual circumstances are like, what their lives are like, why they make the choices and decisions that they make, and what goes on for them that leads them to some of the places where they ultimately end up, which aren't necessarily always positive. And so all three books cover the course of one school year. And so it's just a story about what happens. It

encompasses the students and the teachers and the parents and the community, the school secretary, the custodian, the bus driver. So everyone who comes in contact with young people in the school setting is encompassed in the story. And of course, the main character is the social worker. Right. That's the other thing I was getting to is the main character is Peyton Stanfield. She's the social worker. She's the one that's going through. So we're seeing the story through her lens. Yes. Yes. How much of that part of the books are drawn on real life experiences? Well, it definitely has informed my writing for this series, I must say. And it's really just a compilation of just over 20 years of working in schools and with young people

and just knowing about instances and things that have happened in schools, whether it be something that I knew about specifically or just knew of. And so there are sort of general themes with young people around dealing with the issues that they deal with That might be family-based, it might be community-based, whether it's learning deficits. So it's really easy to kind of develop stories around those kind of central themes that I see happen with young people. Unfortunately, exposure to violence and just poverty, the effects of being exposed to communities that are high-poverty communities and what that does to the young people and their ability to access their curriculum in a school setting and even getting to school to even be able to access their curriculum.

Children today are faced with a number of challenges from the drug epidemic sweeping the country to issues surrounding school safety and violence. What are some other challenges school social workers face in helping their clients? Resources. So just having the resources to be able to provide what we feel like our students need. A lot of schools in urban settings have very small funding streams, if you will. So it's very difficult to maybe access things such as therapeutic materials or books or anything of those natures to kind of help our young people with whatever it is that they may be dealing with.

So we may have group counseling sessions, or even if it's individual sessions, sometimes school social workers run after-school programs. So we're all over the building. We're doing lots of different, wearing lots of different hats, doing lots of different tasks, and sometimes it's very difficult to get hold of the items that you may need to be able to effectively implement a program. Recently, there has been a movement to employ more social workers and other mental health professionals in schools as an alternative to armed school resource officers. What's your take on that? This is just sort of something that we've been pushing for in the industry

for probably as long as I've been in the industry, if not longer. And there's never enough. I mean, you could never have enough mental health professionals in the building, which sadly is indicative of what our young people are facing today. I'm certainly not an advocate of having armed school resource officers in the building. I think that I'd rather err on the side of being proactive as opposed to being reactive and putting those services and programs in place for our young people and their families to help them to deal with the challenges that they face before it gets to the point where

someone is feeling like they have to resort to an action such as harming themselves or others. Would you say that working as a school social worker is a balancing act? What with trying to keep the best interests of children who may be at risk at heart, working with parents as well as collaborating with other professionals? I do think it's a balancing act. I don't know that I necessarily think that it's a balancing act in trying to keep the best interests of the children and working with the parents and collaborating with other professionals. Collaborating with other professionals is actually one of my favorite parts of working in schools because generally schools not only have

social workers, but they may have psychologists, and there are other mental health professionals. Some schools even have child psychiatrists that come on site and work with our young people. I've been in schools where local universities have had mental health services and clinics within the school setting. And so that's always worked out very well in terms of collaborating together and whether it's developing treatment plans or working with families and students. Working with parents is always great. I think that parents sometimes are not given the, I would say, the due that they should be given. sometimes parents are seen as not necessarily interested in being actively involved in their child's lives. And I always caution people not to sort of have that opinion about our parents.

I've never met a parent who doesn't care about their child, but I have met a parent who has outside psychosocial factors that greatly impact their ability to provide or give for their children what they want at that time. What do you see as the main role of a school social worker? is it developing a positive school climate reporting abuse and neglect or talking to disgruntled parents all of the above yeah all of the above and a few more things it kind of depends on where you are so for example in baltimore city the main role of school social workers is to provide services to students with disabilities really that is not the case in every school district so i think that's a really good point um and it's relative it is you know and and

and it gets it's not understood so um sometimes people will just assume okay so you have social workers in your building and so they're just here to service everybody and they may not necessarily be a child that's um a child that has been found to have a disability so we have general education students who are in the building who exhibit issues and concerns and challenges and all of that. But in some of the buildings, the school social worker's role is to work strictly with that population. So does that mean you don't help those kids who may have other issues or do you refer them to someone else? No, it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't. A, you can refer them someplace else. There are also what we term as general social workers in a building who

work specifically with the general education population, but in most cases, sometimes it is a referral out. What I will say is that typically, as school social workers, we go into, we enter in a building, first thing you want to do is kind of connect with the administration in the building, you know, the principals or head of schools or whoever it is, and just get an idea for what is it that they're looking for their school social worker, the type of role they would like for their school social worker to have in their building granted we also bring with us ideas of these are some of the things that we think you may want to focus on whether it be mental health awareness it could be grief issues around grief and loss you know it could be issues around trauma children

exposed to trauma and and what sort of services and programs we could provide for that so really just it then that's where it becomes almost like a collaboration because you really should sit down with your principal in your building, conduct a needs assessment, find out what they think are what's needed in your building with your students, and then from there determine what programs and services would be most applicable. Do you think school social workers face more unique challenges depending on where they work? And are the challenges different depending on the age of the child? I do think that school social workers face unique challenges if you're working in an urban setting. And I would say probably there are unique challenges in

suburban settings. But let's not forget, there are also unique challenges in rural settings. And I know that sometimes we don't always have that conversation about rural settings and young people that live in rural settings and also on Indian reservations, Native Americans. So there's lots of different populations that school social workers work with, but absolutely unique challenges in every one of those settings. Now, what kind of advice would you give a young person who may be considering a degree in the field of social work? I would say talk to professionals in the field.

Get as much information as possible. Do your homework, you know, just investigate schools of social work. Read what their focus areas are. talking if you if you know that you're interested in maybe working in a hospital setting maybe volunteering at a hospital or asking to go and shadow a social worker in whatever industry that you're interested in working in and one other thing I'd like to say is social workers are across the board in different industries we're in corporate America you know we're not just in human services we're not just in child protective services social workers just don't take children

from their parents you know where we provide the majority of the mental health services in this country. And so I think that usually when I talk to young people who are interested in pursuing or thinking, oh, I think I may want to think about social work, it's very one-dimensional for them. So I really encourage them to go out and talk to people and find out what they're doing. And if they study, you can do policy. There's macro social work. As we know, there's micro social work. It's so many areas that you could find yourself. So I encourage them to go out and do their homework. Those are all really good tips. When you're helping children cope with traumatic events, how do you manage self-care? I write. Okay. It all goes back to the writing. It all

goes back to the writing, yeah. What do you find rewarding about social work? Being able to empower another person, another human being to get to that place where they feel good about being able to make a choice and decision for themselves. I think the most rewarding has been when a young person comes back after maybe five or even 10 years of you working with them and saying, thank you, or I'm so glad you pushed me in this area. I'm so glad you encouraged me to do this or you encouraged me to do that. So that's probably the ultimate reward. Brenda, what do you hope readers ultimately take away from the Charmtown series? I think what I want them to understand is that education in America looks different for in different places. It looks different for different kids. And so I

think that I'd like for people to understand that no matter what zip code a young person or kid lives in, that they all want the same things. Like they all want to be able to come to school to be free to access their education, to sit in a classroom where they don't have to worry about what happened at home last night, if the lights are on, if my clothing and my furniture is going to be on the curb when I come home, if my mom is going to have enough resources or enough money to feed us or purchase clothing, that they can just come into the classroom and be able and have the ability to just kind of sit there and take the lesson that the teacher is providing them in the class and not be burdened with those stressors. And I also want people to understand that kids

are kids no matter where they grow up, you know. They just, no matter what they look like and suburban, urban, whatever, you know, every kid wants to be loved. You know, every kid wants to be valued and every kid wants to learn, you know. So that's probably the biggest takeaway and that there are differences and that kids that go to school in urban settings sometimes are asked to achieve and compete at the same level where kids that may go to school in more affluent school districts. So the character of Peyton Stanfield is very complex. She's a single a single woman. She's dating another character who's married. The social work part of the book is threaded through her tail of what she's encountering.

So I want you to talk a little bit about Peyton. So Peyton Stanfield is a fun girl. You know, she loves being a social worker. And she comes to Montebello and she finds that she really enjoys like working with the young people there. But she encounters Hamilton Banks. And from there, this relationship just takes off at lightning speed. And so in Woven in the Story is what happens with that relationship

and then how that relationship impacts the work that she does at the school. What I was trying to demonstrate is that, you know, social workers, we're people too, you know, and we have imperfect lives just like everyone else, and sometimes we're faced with making choices and decisions that may not necessarily be the best choice or decision that we should make for ourselves and how that plays out in the work that we do and how she tries to balance that. And who's your favorite character in the book? My favorite character in the book is Jarrett

because he is a young person who is super smart. I mean, like intellectually, he is scoring off the charts. But because of his personal situation, he hardly comes to school. When he does come to school, he's quite disruptive. He's not really able to, he's not accessing his education at all. and he gets into a situation where he's clearly in over his head and he he has developed a very

close relationship with Gina who's an assistant principal in the building but what I like about Jared is that he knows that he's a smart kid he has made some choices that are not the best choices and decisions that he could have made for himself but he still comes back to the school because he knows that I can rise above this, I can do better. And he comes back each time and he's looking for the support, which is what our young people do. You know, they come in and they tell us these stories about what happened last night or what happened last week.

But I'm here today and I'm sitting in this classroom and I'm going to try to get this work because, as Jared says, I'm going to try to get into this college that you want me to go to. And that's what he says to Gina in the conversation that they're having. So I love telling his story because so many young people that's their story of Jared and sometimes Jared those those kids are written off as as as whatever and really they're not I mean they're some of the smartest kids I've ever met you know who just have been put in unfortunate circumstances so when I am talking about the story in Charmtown

and it's intentional is that it's not just specific to one urban city in America there are people who have read this book that are all over the country and they think that this is exactly what's going on where I work. A lot of times a school social worker in the building, we're not just necessarily attending meetings, but we really are right there one-on-one with a young person that may have a very hard decision that they have to make or something that they've done and they're not sure what they should do next. So when the Freddie Gray incident happened in Baltimore City, I was writing the first novel. And so I was looking at the news and watching all of the cable news channels, and everybody was in Baltimore, and they were interviewing

community activists and some young people. But it just seemed like the overriding sentiment about the young people was that, oh, they're, you know, running out of the school building, and the kids here don't want to learn. And all of these negative kind of connotations I felt were attributed to all the kids in Baltimore City and I thought wow and remind our listeners about Freddie Gray so oh I'm sorry so Freddie Gray was an incident that happened in Baltimore City where he was arrested by Baltimore City police officers and he was placed in their wagon and something happened where he was severely injured and he ultimately died from his injuries and so it was a huge case in Baltimore City, the police, there were charges brought forth on the police officers and no one

in the end ultimately ended up serving any time. So there's a whole story behind all that, but that's basically the gist to the Freddie Gray situation. But out of that did come police reform. We have a wonderful state's attorney, Marilyn Mosby there, who really stepped up and took the forefront in bringing charges and really talking about the need for police reform. And lots of things has happened for the city under her reign in terms of reforming police and the way we go about policing and kind of the way we think about policing and I do know that in the area where Freddie Gray lived and where he grew up like different grant programs have happened in that area so thankfully positive have some positives have come out of that very sad and unfortunate

incident but we still have a long way to go and so as I was writing this story I wanted to make I thought to myself wow you know if I didn't work with these kids so I have friends who don't work in school settings you know who just are watching tv and they think wow you know is that really what it's like and we might have conversations and I say to them no that's you know there are wonderful kids that go to this school or wonderful kids that go to that school and people just need to hear their story. So I wanted to tell a story where I'm specifically telling the individual story of a young person.

And so you as the reader can get a better understanding of, wow, I can see if that person, a young person, had to deal with all of that, why it might be kind of hard, that it's difficult for me to just get to school, let alone anything further. Any additional thoughts? I really want people to understand that these young people are individuals and they have individual stories. And some of their stories are gripping. Some of

their stories are not the best stories that you could hear. And they're put in instances and places unimaginable, certainly to me in my childhood, and yet they still get up every day and they still come in and they still want someone to be there and tell them, you know what, to be their champion, that it's going to be okay, you know, that you just keep moving forward and there will be people there to support you and to hold you up. Brenda, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today. And thank you listeners for taking the time to join us. Be sure and check out show notes for resources. Until next time. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association

of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. And don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode. Thank you.