Amidst the speeches and the ribbon cutting, Greg Smith took a moment to walk through the modest one-story home at the corner of Fair Park Boulevard and West 28th Street in Little Rock, thinking about all it took to get there.
“This has been my dream for 20 years,” said Smith, executive director of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s MidSOUTH program.
Smith’s career has taken him from therapy services all the way to administration as head of UA Little Rock’s human services workforce training division, and Wednesday’s dedication of the university’s Child Welfare Learning Lab marked one of the most significant steps forward for educating future social services providers.
It is also sure to provide an educational setting unlike anything seen on the UA Little Rock campus.
“There’s a gun behind you, in a case that will be unlocked sometimes,” Smith told a visitor walking through the house. “We actually have all kinds of props in the back, so we can make it worse.”
The house, post ribbon-cutting, was already looking scruffy enough. Fake (but quite lifelike) cockroaches dotted the kitchen next to a pile of plastic eggs left on the counter, and one living room corner was saddled with a small pile of artificial animal feces.
“We are opening a new way of preparing child welfare professionals to serve Arkansas children and their families,” said Tiffany Wright, director of the Division of Children and Family Services for the Arkansas Department of Human Services. “The work is so important, and we have a responsibility to prepare our workforce in the best way possible.”
And that led to the house itself, a long-unused piece of university property, to take on its current form — not just as a classroom, but a living and breathing simulation of what students may face when they enter homes to check on child welfare.
“This space was built with one goal in mind,” Smith said. “That’s to bridge the gap between learning and practice, instead of only talking about difficult conversations, home visits or family engagement.”
There is much, much more to working in the field of child welfare beyond touring a house and picking out each and every instance of untidiness. There are differences between homes that bear marks of poverty versus ones that bear marks of neglect, and there are laundry lists of issues exclusive to certain age groups.
“We’ll switch the house up for each of these things,” Smith said. “For infants, we’re looking for safe sleep. With toddlers, we’re going to worry about medication that’s not secure. And then we have adolescents, we’ll look at more of their drug use, also. So as we move through, we will do simulations.”
The idea, Wright said, is to ensure future child welfare professionals graduate with more than a classroom experience — vital for the sort of work done by DCFS and other agencies.
“Child welfare represents some of the most challenging work anyone can choose to do,” Wright said. “Every decision matters, every conversation matters, every interaction has the potential to change the trajectory of a child’s life.”
Photo by Sadie Rylander
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