West Virginia University students are putting pen to paper in order to protect some of the state’s most vulnerable residents.

Ten students and numerous professors in the School of Social Work have engaged in a letter writing campaign in order to affect and clarify legislation created by the West Virginia Legislature.

As a result of Senate Bill 559, the West Virginia Board of Social Work proposed an emergency rule in June that allowed the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources to offer restricted provisional licenses in order to solve its recent problems with hiring and maintaining licensed social workers.

According to many social workers around the state, this rule could imply that people with restricted provisional licenses will have the ability to exchange their provisionary licenses for a licensed social worker (LSW) license, which would otherwise require earning a bachelor’s degree in social work. Students and faculty alike have raised their pens and voices in protest against this rule.

“It is not beneficial to the state to hire individuals who are not competent for this particular field. You would not expect your surgeon to have gone to beauty school rather than medical school,” one student wrote.

This rule concerns many social workers because it allows people who may have not gone through an adequate amount of training to be licensed social workers for the DHHR.

“The people served by the DHHR are some of the most vulnerable citizens in our state, such as young children and older adults,” said Leslie Tower, professor in the School of Social Work. “A formal social work education helps prepare workers to handle very complex, difficult, and sometimes dangerous situations that they will face in the field.”

The students learned how to effectively engage in political action to create change during a class the group took this spring. While taking a class together this summer, the students learned about the new law and put the lessons they learned in class to work.

Students and practitioners feel some of the DHHR’s problems could be avoided by improving pay and work conditions.

“West Virginia deserves the best and brightest. This may be accomplished with competitive salaries and working conditions,” Tower said.

The new emergency rule could lead to other agencies and clinics with similar problems to attempt to hire people with only restricted provisional licenses, which could turn unqualified practitioners into licensed social workers. The problems with this law could not only oversaturate the field of social work with under qualified workers, but also put into danger the same people who social workers are sworn to help.

“As social workers, it is our duty to look out for society’s best interest,” another student wrote. “Allowing those who have not had the opportunity to sufficiently learn the ethical and theoretical frameworks of social work practice puts the most vulnerable in our society at even greater risk and thus goes against all that social work stands for.”

-WVU-

jj/07/12/2015

CONTACT: Devon Copeland, Director of Marketing and Communication, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, West Virginia University, 304-293-6867, Devon.Copeland@mail.wvu.edu

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