Archive: January 2024

By Dr. Jeffrey Krukar, Licensed Psychologist/Certified School Psychologist, Genesee Lake School In our last post, we offered an example of how members of the Wisconsin Association of Family & Children’s Agencies used the EDGE curriculum to advance best practice performance measurement among a group of private child welfare service providers. In this post, we focus on the work of one of those organizations. Here, guest contributor Dr. Jeffrey Krukar describes how he is applying lessons learned in EDGE to improve the way his agency, Genesee Lake School, uses evidence to drive the process of improvement. In her description of WAFCA’s work, Emily Coddington wrote, “WAFCA members are strong believers in the concept that once you know better, you must do better.” GLS’s efforts post-participation in EDGE exemplify this commitment. Inspired to do better, GLS leaders have invested time, resources, and staff to ensure their performance measures are valid, reliable, and… Read more >

By: Emily Coddington, Associate Director, Wisconsin Association of Family & Children’s Agencies In a previous post, we described how the Data Center’s EDGE training program improved research evidence use capability among child welfare administrators. A number of those agencies are members of the Wisconsin Association of Family & Children’s Agencies (WAFCA), a trade organization that represents child and family serving agencies across the state. In this guest post, WAFCA’s Associate Director, Emily Coddington, talks about how, after participating in EDGE, member agencies leveraged WAFCA’s support to put what they learned into action.  We draw attention to WAFCA’s work to highlight the role professional organizations can play in supporting their member agencies to advance best practice measurement. The case study below is very much a story about private organizations achieving together what they might not have been able to achieve on their own. In this case, a committed group of agency… Read more >

By Lily Alpert, Fred Wulczyn, Molly Van Drunen, Scott Huhr, and Kristen Hislop Several years ago, the W.T. Grant Foundation supported the Center for State Child Welfare Data to conduct a randomized control trial of our research evidence use (REU) training program, EDGE: Evidence-Driven Growth & Excellence. The project falls under the Foundation’s interest in interventions that advance REU among child and family serving organizations. In short, if REU is associated with improved outcomes for children and families, as emerging research suggests it is,[i],[ii] then agencies will be wise to invest in professional development programs that improve REU among their staff. To that end, EDGE aims to improve REU among leaders and managers of child welfare agencies. Our study took place in a state where counties contract with private agencies to provide care and placement to children in foster care. We delivered EDGE to representatives from twelve such agencies—seven in… Read more >