Welcome to the Deep Dive podcast series, supporting student readings from Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s (2023) School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide (2nd ed.). Episodes are generated using Gemini Notebook. The intention of this resource is to support students in my SOWK 587 class as they go through the course, and to provide a secondary way for students to be exposed to course material. The expectation is to still read all of the required course materials.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 1, “An Overview of the Theoretical Information Necessary in the Field of School Social Work,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
The school social worker’s job in 1913 was to check tenements and make sure children were in their seats; today it is to disrupt the systems that keep them out. The episode traces that change decade by decade — the Depression shifting the work toward food and shelter, the postwar years turning it inward toward students’ psychology, the 1960s pushing it back outward toward racism and neglect, and COVID-19 returning it to food insufficiency and housing — alongside the legal record that forced it: Brown v. Board, Section 504, PL 94-142 and its evolution into IDEA, and No Child Left Behind, which tied federal funding to test scores and made removing socioeconomic barriers a matter of institutional survival. The second half turns to the chapter’s theory, working through the systems approach, the ecological perspective, and the strengths perspective, pausing on whether a strengths focus risks minimizing systemic trauma, and closing on positionality.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 2, “A Typical Day?,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
A school social worker’s schedule is not a project plan but an emergency room triage tool — a baseline of legally binding obligations that tells you what you are deferring when the day falls apart, which it usually does by nine in the morning. The episode follows a year out from that starting point: the isolation of working in a host setting where the prevailing paradigm is education rather than clinical care, and a post-COVID baseline of food insufficiency, housing uncertainty, and grief that has to be addressed before a student can take in a math lesson. It works through advocacy as the engine of the job, using the book’s own cases — Dan, coached to speak to the teacher who insulted him rather than having an adult do it for him; John, Joe, and Sam, whose accommodations force the school to bend to the child instead of the reverse; a senior born in Portugal whose failing grades turned out to be a language barrier the system had pathologized. It closes on discipline, the manifestation determination review, and what an intern’s own background brings into the building.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 3, “Introduction and Definitions: Discussion of the Skills, Techniques, and Essential Practices,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
School social workers are what Bronstein and Abramson called resident guests — clinicians working inside an institution whose primary mission is academic rather than therapeutic. The episode builds the chapter out from that idea through a diplomat analogy: you live under your host’s laws while your own values stay rooted in the person and environment perspective. It traces the profession’s origins as visiting teachers focused on attendance, and argues the truancy officer’s ghost still shapes what a teacher expects when they send a student down to your office. From there it works through the legal vocabulary the job demands — state credentialing requirements, the shift from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, and IDEA’s guarantee of a free appropriate public education, with least restrictive environment explained as a kind of medical triage running from mainstreaming to self-contained programs to out-of-district placement. It also covers Section 504, ancillary versus related services, due process hearings, independent educational evaluations paid for by the district, and the students who are struggling but never qualify for an IEP.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 4, “Special Education and School Social Work,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
Special education in schools rests on federal law, and the episode starts there. It walks through IDEA’s guarantee of a free appropriate public education and its requirement that interventions connect to educational outcomes, the move from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act and its accountability for student subgroups, and FERPA’s protection of student records. It then explains response to intervention and multi-tiered systems of support as a way to test classroom instruction before a disability label is considered, and contrasts the family-centered IFSP for infants and toddlers with the IEP. From there it follows the child study team, where the social worker’s social developmental history, genograms, and ecomaps bring family context into the evaluation and into specific IEP supports. It closes on racial and ethnic disproportionality, the needs of immigrant, refugee, and SIFE students, manifestation determination in school discipline, and a question about keeping IEP mandates intact during remote learning.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 5, “Collaboration and Consultation with Parents, Faculty, Staff, and Administration,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
Collaboration sits at the center of school social work, and this episode follows it outward from families to faculty to the whole school system. It begins with the barriers that keep parents away, including work schedules, language, painful memories of their own schooling, and the digital divide, then traces Swap’s four models of parental involvement from the protective model to a true partnership. It offers practical bridges such as home–school notebooks and trainer-led parent management training. The conversation then turns to earning trust with teachers, using Dupper’s strengths-based consultation model and workshops that help faculty tell organic from emotional ADHD. It looks at how teachers and social workers can read the same student differently, and how to stay anchored to the student’s interests when an educational advocate enters the room, illustrated by a disputed wilderness placement and the least restrictive environment. It closes at the system level with Berzin’s three levels of consultation, Comer and Haynes’s School Development Program, and service on accreditation committees.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 6, “Ethical Dilemmas,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
School social workers practice in a host environment, where the building’s mission is education and theirs is the safety and well-being of students, and this episode looks at the ethical decisions that tension produces. It opens with three lenses for decision-making: deontological, teleological, and social constructivist, illustrated by a case where a grandmother’s consent turns out not to be valid. It then takes up confidentiality and the “need to know” in schools, the difference between telling and tattling, the duty to warn established in Tarasoff, and FERPA, along with the importance of explaining the limits of confidentiality at the first session. A scenario about a weekend party is worked through Raines’s seven-step process, and the ethical principles screen is presented as a way to rank competing values, with protection of life at the top. The episode closes on dual relationships, the obligation to challenge systemic inequities, and keeping sessions confidential in e-therapy.
This episode was generated using Gemini Notebook from Chapter 7, “Being a Culturally Responsive School Social Worker,” in Jarolmen and Bautista-Thomas’s School Social Work: A Direct Practice Guide. It is designed to help you engage with and review the material, not to replace the reading.
Cultural responsiveness is presented here as a lifelong posture rather than a skill to check off, and this episode traces what that means for school social workers. It starts with the 2017 NASW change from cultural competence to cultural awareness, then turns inward to self-assessment through the Multicultural Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills Survey and to reflexivity about power. The hosts look at how language and culture can be mistaken for cognitive deficits, using the chapter’s example of a recent immigrant from Portugal whose evaluation had to happen in her native language, and why an independent interpreter, never a child or sibling, is required. They discuss the pressures on immigrant and refugee students, including high-stakes testing and grade retention, and the nepantlera-informed paradigm drawn from Gloria Anzaldua’s work. The episode closes with Dupper’s steps for changing racist behavior in schools, how poverty drives absenteeism, and how to respect students’ religious practice without probing private beliefs.
