Virginia School Social Workers’ Roles, Responsibilities, and Perceptions of Practice Efficacy

Overview: Findings from a cross-sectional survey of school social workers in Virginia completed during the 2019-2020 school year will be discussed. Researchers examined the similarities and differences in school social workers' roles, responsibilities, and perceptions of efficacy relative to the knowledge and skills required for data-driven evidence informed practice.Proposal text: School social worker roles and responsibilities vary from state to state and are determined by a number of factors including federal and state mandates, school division needs, and decisions about how school divisions allocate their resources. Hence, the primary purpose of this study was to examine the variation among Virginia school social workers’ roles, responsibilities, and perceptions of efficacy relative to the knowledge and skills required to engage in evidence-informed practice.

Methods: 164 school social workers (32% response rate) completed a Google survey during the 2019-2020 school year. 92% identified as female, 67% identified as White, 27% as Black, 1.8% as Latino, and 1.2% as Asian or Pacific Islander. 72% were credentialed by the Virginia Department of Education and 35% were also licensed clinical social workers.
In addition to univariate analyses, bivariate and multivariate statistical procedures were used to examine statistically significant relationships between several knowledge and evidence-informed practice criterion measures and five demographic variables: (1) years of school social work practice experience, (2) description of the school district locale (e.g. mostly urban), (3) total population of students enrolled in the district, (4) social worker to student ratio, and (5) the school district’s funding status.
Findings:
Home visits (85.4%), parent interviews (96.3%), and referrals to outside agencies (95.1%) were identified the most as tasks that enabled those surveyed to effectively address students’ academic, behavioral or social-emotional concerns. Attendance and discipline records, teacher reports, and grades were used more often than rating scales or classroom observations to monitor students’ progress. 68% of the respondents acknowledged that they had limited or no experience using standardized measures for progress monitoring. Conspicuously, 63.1% rated their treatment fidelity skills as adequate or very adequate.
Overall, the respondents reported high levels of knowledge efficacy. For example, 82.3% were knowledgeable or very knowledgeable of family –level interventions that support students’ well-being and 79.3% were knowledgeable or very knowledgeable of clinical interventions for students who have behavioral or social-emotional concerns. In contrast, 49.4% of the respondents believed that their evidence-informed efforts to increase parents’ capacity to improve their child’s educational outcomes and 65.9% believed that their evidence-informed efforts with school-level stakeholders to increase their capacity to improve students’ outcomes were not effective. However, respondents who consulted more often with school administrators about students’ concerns or completed more student-level clinical assessment interviews reported higher levels of practice efficacy.
Multivariate regression methods were used to explore the relationships between criterion measures and the demographic variables. In one model, years of school social work experience predicted their knowledge of evidence-informed practices that remove barriers to learning for traumatized youth (b = -0.17, t(5) = -2.60, p = .01). As years or experience increased, their knowledge decreased. In another model, as total student enrollment increased (b = .135, t(5) = 3.77, p < .001) participants’ knowledge of social- emotional clinical interventions increased and when worker to student ratio decreased (b = -0.117, t(5) = -2.65, p = .009) participants’ knowledge of social- emotional clinical interventions increased.