Purpose and History

Purpose

Our program is designed to give current and prospective foster parents, caregivers, and others who provide care for children and youth, the kind of specialized training they need.

It was recognized that caregivers, 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.

History

In January 2009, our contract with DSHS was cancelled due to budget concerns within the state of Washington. We could no longer offer the workshops for free and and to begin charging a fee in order to support our program and the needs of caregivers who cannot attend classroom sessions outside of their home. In 2006, we stopped providing the on-ground workshops and began to focus solely on the online delivery method. 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.