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A joint UNCG-N.C. A&T training program that teaches social workers how to navigate complex child-welfare problems would be cut under the budget proposal that Gov. Bev Perdue sent to the General Assembly this week.

The Greensboro program is one of 10 under the umbrella of the North Carolina Child Welfare Collaborative. In exchange for tuition breaks and specialized training, students agree to work for public social services agencies for at least two years after graduation.

“The state has invested 10 years building bridges between departments of social service and universities, and that will be lost,” said Dan Beerman, a UNCG professor who coordinates the teaching program in Greensboro.

Graduates work with children who need protection from abusive homes, who are in the foster care system or who otherwise need the state’s supervision and protection.

The governor’s budget would eliminate $261,028 in state funding every year and allow the Department of Health and Human Services to redirect another $2.8 million in federal funding to other areas.

“The department believes there are more cost-effective means of encouraging child welfare employment,” reads the budget Perdue sent to the General Assembly.

“All the cuts we’re looking at have been difficult, and this is not because the program isn’t working,” said Sherry Bradsher, director of the state Division of Social Services.

She said the collaborative’s 10 programs have been slow-growing and still do not place students in all 100 of the state’s counties.

Bradsher said the state needed to look at programs that would get qualified social workers to agencies across the state faster. The division, she said, was looking at incentive programs offered to professionals in other fields, such as teaching.

The state’s ailing budget, she said, “has forced us to look at how we can do more with these dollars.”

But UNCG’s Beerman says the collaborative saves money in several ways. For example, research shows graduates of the collaborative stay in their public service jobs longer than nongraduates, meaning that agencies don’t have to hire and train replacements as often.

And local social service administrators say the collaborative has created a needed pipeline of talent.

“We were not getting many applicants who had studied social work or had a lot of experience,” said Brenda Evans, deputy director of the Forsyth Department of Social Services. Graduates of the collaborative come having done internships and with solid qualifications, she said.

In addition, the collaborative program incorporates certain state-required training courses that a newly hired employee otherwise would have to complete during their first months of work before taking on a caseload.

“That is a huge obstacle,” Evans said. Collaborative students are able to go to work three to four months sooner than social work graduates who come in without the specialized training, she said.

Beerman said that social service agencies estimate collaborative graduates save taxpayers about $10,000 in training costs and lost time.

Linda Atack, a one-time nonprofit manager who has returned to school so she could work with children in the foster care system, said without the tuition help she would have never have been able to enroll in the program. Nor, Atack said, would she have been as confident in tackling what will be a challenging caseload.

“It’s that little bit of extra edge and little bit of extra confidence,” she said, adding that a lot of her fellow students were encountering problems unique to the rural poor for the first time. “I don’t think a lot of people have seen some of the poverty.”

The program’s future is uncertain, but it may not be doomed. The Senate and House will now draft their own budget proposals, which may or may not incorporate all of the governor’s recommendations. And there have been bills filed that would expand the collaborative’s programs rather than eliminate it.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com