 EA's assessment program may be the first of its type to voluntarily put the agency and its children to the test of objective measurement. We believe that placement agencies will come to accept this standard as necessary to insure adequate services.
While our assessment is not a substitute for a psychological evaluation, it is more usable for residential care purposes.
We have two goals: to identify the child's current level of functioning and to determine how much progress was made over time. In 1991, EA adopted an ambitious and progressive assessment program. Not only does it meet our goals, but it provides a wealth of information to assess foster parents, group homes, and the entire EA program.
Doing assessments at six month intervals coordinates with court reviews and determines with greater accuracy whether underlying progress is made.
Because of the frequency and superficial nature of typical reports, children can slip through the crack of scrutiny.
No agency wants to admit this in
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public, but it happens. With EA's intensive testing program, we dramatically narrow the cracks. Every child in our program undergoes the same level of objective measurement.
Our
Accessment Includes:
Independent Living Skills
Emotional Adjustment
Social Work Summary
We compare a child's physical and social development, along with performance in self-help, domestic, and community living skills, to the average child's performance. Rate of skill acquisition is monitored to predict the child's ability to be successful at independence. All ages, from birth to adulthood, are tracked.
By age 15, each child enters an independent living skills program. Programs based in the foster home involve assessment of nearly 800 skills associated with competence in living independently.
Emotional adjustment refers to the child's feelings of self-esteem. We find this aspect
surprisingly unpredictable, but |
important in understanding the child's functioning. Self-esteem seems to be associated with motivation, but often is not related to objective levels of performance.
We notice that when children begin to thrive, typically their self-worth increases.
Social workers are trained under the supervision of a licensed clinical psychologist. Each assessment is reviewed and approved by the psychologist to insure accuracy and high standards.
Included in our assessment is a traditional social work summary, which completes the picture. It also serves as a check and balance against errors in the objective testing. Finally, the report identifies specific treatment plans for foster parents and group home staff to follow.
Internally, the report is used as a working document, shared with foster families and group home staff. Our Treatment program is directly linked to the child's identified deficits by having prescriptive teaching methods for each skill the child is expected to learn.
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