Position Details
Are you passionate about shaping young minds and fostering a love for learning? Detroit Community Schools is seeking a dynamic and dedicated Social Worker to join our team for the 2024-2025 school year. At DCS, we believe that Education is Power. We are committed to providing all students with the tools and skills necessary to thrive no matter where life takes them. If you possess the required experience, we want to hear from you!
Job Summary
The School Social Worker promotes and enhances the overall academic mission by providing services that strengthen home, school, and community partnerships and address barriers to learning and achievement.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Counsel individual students and student groups, regarding issues including mental health, poverty, substance abuse, physical abuse, rehabilitation, social adjustment, or childcare.
- Interview students individually or in families, assessing their situations, capabilities, and problems, to determine what services are required to meet their needs.
- Serve as a liaison between school and students, homes, family services, child guidance clinics, courts, protective services, doctors, and other contacts, to help children who face problems such as disabilities, abuse, or poverty.
- Consult with parents, teachers, and other school personnel to determine causes of problems such as truancy and misbehavior, and to implement solutions.
- Participate as members of the IEP, IAT, PBIS and other school-based teams to develop interventions for promoting students’ academic success.
- Counsel students whose behavior, school progress, or mental or physical impairment indicate a need for assistance, diagnosing students’ problems and arranging for needed services.
- Address legal issues, such as child abuse and discipline.
- Demonstrate a relentless drive to improve the minds and lives of students in and out of school.
- Provide consistent rewards and/or consequences for student behavior to ensure that students observe the school’s core values, high expectations, and code of conduct.
- Implement activities to help students meet academic and social expectations.
- Provide appropriate supervision of students during class, breaks, meals, and transitions to maintain an optimal work environment and to ensure students’ safety and well-being.
- Provide crisis intervention and behavior management to build students’ ability to meet the school’s high expectations.
- Other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
- Knowledge of principles, methods, and procedures for diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of physical and mental issues.
- Understanding of group behavior and dynamics, societal trends and influences, ethnicity and cultures.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
- Strong organizational skills.
- Ability to serve as a liaison between school, parents, students and outside resources.
- Master’s degree in School Social Work LMSW, preferred.
- Must possess or be eligible to possess a valid State of Michigan Certification as a School Social Worker.
- Experience as a School Social Worker, preferred.
- Familiar with the basic concepts of positive youth development.
- Experience with working in diverse low-income communities, and sensitivity to and awareness of the needs of culturally diverse urban adolescents and families.
- Excellent interpersonal communication skills.
- Ability to work effectively as a member of a multidisciplinary team.
- Will successfully pass a criminal background check.
