Purpose & History of OFPE

Purpose

The Foster Parent Education program was developed in collaboration with the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) Office of Training and Development and representatives from several private agencies. The program is designed to give current and prospective foster parents, and others who give substitute care for children and youth, the kind of specialized training they need.

In the Pierce College catalog, see Foster Parent Education, to learn more about the Associate in Foster Parent Education degree, the Associate in Arts and Sciences (with emphasis in Foster Parent Education) degree and the Certificate of Foster Parent Education.

It was recognized that foster parents with their commitments to family would especially benefit from distance learning opportunities. Distance Learning would bring the training they need, beyond their license certification training, to them in their world. The flexibility of such offerings makes participation possible when coming to the campus–based classroom or training sites is not.

Background

From 2000 to 2005, 14 online credit courses were developed to deliver the entire Foster Parent Education certificate program online. In 2005 we made a transition to creating non–credit “workshops” running in an online mode for three weeks and six hours in on-ground sessions, targeting specific “hot” topics. In 2006, we stopped providing the on-ground workshops and began to focus solely on the online delivery method.