Tuesday February 17th, along with our lobbyist Jessica Petrie Thelemaque, I met with Vanessa Beauchamp with the State Committee for Social Work, State Senator Patty Lewis and State Representatives Tara Peters, Keri Ingle, Pattie Mansur, Aaron Crossley and Elizabeth Fuchs.

In our meeting with Vanessa, I stressed our desire to work with her and the Social Work Board to uphold social work standards and educate social workers about their responsibilities as licensed professionals.  I offered to have her write an article for our monthly newsletter, which she agreed to do. She expressed appreciation for our acceptance of their workshop proposal for our annual conference. She did express concern about poor supervision she has seen at times.  During our meeting I asked if it might be possible sometime in the future for the Department to promulgate a rule to allow social work graduates to take the state jurisprudence exam in place of the national ASWB exam.  She asked if we had support from our membership for this change. After discussing this item with the Board of Directors, we will be surveying membership on this issue. You can look for this survey in the near future.   On her part Vanessa agreed to check to see if their current thirty question jurisprudence exam would suffice for such an exam or whether they would have to spend time and money coming up with a new exam.



Our legislative appointments went very well. We first met with Republican State Representative Tara Peters who is the lead on our supervision bill and is also working on the AI mental health bill. We thanked her for her work on our behalf on these bills.  We next had a long meeting with Democratic State Representative Keri Ingle. She is a social worker and a strong advocate for all our social justice issues. Following this appointment we met with Democratic State Senator Patty Lewis, who is an expert on health care and sponsoring several of our bills. At 2:00 PM the State Assembly started their session. We were able to pull out of session for brief meetings with Democratic State Representatives Patti Mansur, Elizabeth Fuchs and Aaron Crossle.  Elizabeth and Aaron are also MSW social workers.