Find additional resources for foster care and adoption at www.FosterParentCollege.com 1

El tráfico humano y la explotación sexual Now Available

Since its release last October, our course on Understanding Sex Trafficking has been well received by both agencies and resource parents, as comments from the course evaluations indicate:

“This was certainly an eye opener, we appreciate the frankness and clarity used to describe the topic of Trafficking.”

“I think all parents and care givers should take this.”

When we were launching the course in English, the process of having it translated into Spanish had already begun. Now, we are happy to announce that El tráfico humano y la explotación sexual is available on FosterParentCollege.com.

This course helps resource parents understand what the commercial sexual exploitation of children is and what it looks like. It explores some of the myths and facts that surround sex trafficking, and it explains why children in care are especially at risk. It concludes with a discussion on how traffickers target and manipulate vulnerable children.

You can watch a preview of this course in Spanish (https://www.fosterparentcollege.com/course-info/csec-sp) or English (https://www.fosterparentcollege.com/course-info/csec).

Stay tuned! Our two health courses—Children Entering Care: Mental Health Issues (Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud mental) and Children Entering Care: Physical Health Issues (Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud física)—will be released in Spanish later this year.

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fpc@northwestmedia.com

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Adjusting to a New Normal: COVID-19

It is amazing how fast we as a society, as businesses, and as individuals can adapt to a new normal. Life, family, and the economy continue, virus or not. Early this spring, as the pandemic took hold, most of our staff began working from home. It was really uncharted territory that most agencies and businesses were experiencing. Looking back to March, we made several right decisions, and so far none of the FPC staff has come down with the virus.

Yet the virus affected us in a different way. At the beginning of the shutdown, our Director of Development and our Customer Support Team fielded more than twice the usual number of emails and phone calls, as FPC parents and agency staff adjusted to new protocols. Since there was an extremely high demand for support, we focused on helping agency staff “learn how to fish” rather than just taking care of the problem for them. This involves the production of short, visually formatted manuals of the procedures we receive the most requests about.

Our team of three programmers stepped up, too. Usage of the FPC website almost tripled in March, and our server began to suffer. Working day and night, the programming team upgraded our server in less than a week. This was unbelievably fast, as we had to acquire the new server, upgrade the software, and test it while the old server was failing on a daily basis. At times, the site was down for an hour or two, but we barely missed a beat.

With the pandemic in full swing, course script writers switched to working remotely, connecting through programs that allow team writing. Our production team switched to innovative ideas, like using illustrations instead of doing photo shoots and finding ways to record our content experts remotely.

At this point, we offer our employees the option to continue working at home, yet we look forward to the day when it is safe to be fully reunited and working together in person again.

From our FPC family to yours, be well.

Summer 2020

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Administrator’s Tool Chest: Extending Expired Courses

FPC Administrators: We’ve added a new tool that allows you to extend your trainees’ expired courses!

After starting a course, the viewer has 30 days to complete the training. We often have requests by agency workers for the FPC Customer Support Team to extend a trainee’s viewing time after their course expires. With this new tool, agency staff can extend trainees’ viewing time themselves, up to 30 additional days. If those are not enough, it can be extended again. This new tool will save time and emails back and forth between you and the FPC Customer Support Team!

To extend a course, first go to the Member’s Profile:

1. Log in to FosterParentCollege.com

2. You will land on your Community Navigator

3. Click “Search”

4. Type the member’s name, account ID, phone number or email into the search field

5. Click on the member’s name and click “open”

6. Scroll down to the Training Record and click on the expired course that you want to extend

7. In the drop-down box that appears, click 7 days, 15 days, or 30 days to extend the course access accordingly

8. Finally, click “OK” in the pop-up box that appears

Find additional resources for foster care and adoption at www.FosterParentCollege.com 3

In Production! Escalating Behavior Unwrapped

Being prepared for when children’s behavior escalates will help them calm down or “de-escalate” without adding additional stress or retraumatizing them. This course, led by Dr. Martha Merchant, is based on the HEARTS Program, a trauma-informed approach to helping children who escalate. “Doc Martha,” as she prefers to be called, takes a look at what is happening in children’s brains when they become escalated. Then, using exercises and discussions, she explains how to respond prior to or during an escalation in such a way as to help the child get regulated or regain control. The training also explores what parents can do to prevent escalations in the first place. This is a critical course for resource parents who face escalating behavior.

Escalating Behavior Unwrapped will be released this fall. Stay tuned to FosterParentCollege.com or any of our social media channels for the announcement of its release.

New for Course Users: Increasing Viewing Speed

Upon completion of any FPC course, viewers have the option to give feedback to the course producers. On average, over 75% of our users evaluate the courses they have taken, and since adding this feature, we’ve received over 160,000 feedback forms from our users.

Each week, the staff reviews and discusses the evaluations, especially responses to the open-ended question requesting “any comments or suggestions.” The feedback is very helpful, and we have used it to make changes to specific courses, as well as to improve the user experience in general.

A frequent request by users was to have the option of speeding up the courses. Early this summer, we implemented this new feature that allows users to increase the course viewing speed. To ensure learning still happens, this increase is limited to 1.2 times the normal rate.

Recent and Upcoming CoursesFosterParentCollege.com is continually creating new courses and updating existing ones. These are the courses currently in production:

f Escalating Behavior Unwrapped (in production, to be released this fall)

f Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud mental (Spanish translation of Children Entering Care: Mental Health Issues, to be released this fall)

f Niños que entran en el cuidado temporal: Problemas de salud física (Spanish translation of Children Entering Care: Physical Health Issues, to be released later this year)

f Preparing for Post-Secondary Education, Grades 6 to 10 (in production)

f Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (under expert review)

f Eating Issues with Children in Care, 2nd Edition (scripting near completion)

f Children with Autism, 2nd Edition (being scripted)

f Motivational Interviewing for Resource Parents (being scripted)

f Sexual and Reproductive Health (in pre-scripting)

About FosterParentCollege.comFosterParentCollege.com has been providing online, interactive courses designed specifically for foster, adoptive, and kinship families since 2004. Today we offer over 65 courses (including 15 in Spanish) taught by nationally recognized experts. Staff at participating agencies have access to our administrative management system, which lets them register parents as users, assign courses, distribute handouts, and track program progress. Dedicated to providing evidence-based training, we regularly study the effectiveness of our courses, and the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC) has rated both our in-service and blended pre-service training.