The Human Services Agency (HSA) for the City and County of San Francisco is seeking individuals and/or organizations to provide technical assistance and quality assurance for parenting education.

The respondent will be responsible for the coordination of the system by regularly communicating with the parenting education providers, parents in need of parenting education and the Department, and ensure that Departmental requirements are properly communicated to the parenting education providers. The respondent will provide technical assistance to assist new providers to become Approved Providers. The respondent will provide technical assistance to the Approved Providers to ensure that the classes are topical, convenient, accessible and well taught. The respondent will monitor all Approved Providers to ensure that quality baseline standards are maintained. The respondent will maintain regular communications with the Department € s Family and Children € s Services (FCS) resource desk to publicize the Approved Providers to child welfare workers and to respond to the needs of the child welfare workers.

The contract will serve community-based organizations providing parenting education to families whose children have been identified as at-risk of abuse or neglect, and families who have agreed to receive parenting education training as part of the case plan or have been mandated by the courts to receive parenting skills training. Some families will have children placed in out-of-home care, while others will be in-home cases supervised by the Department.

The goals of this contract are to ensure that sufficient classes are available to the clients, classes are of high quality and promote evidence-based practices, meet the needs of the Department, address the diverse needs (such as language-capability and time issues) of the clients, and consistently provide assistance to the community-based organizations to improve the utilization of classes by clients, maximize the number of clients enrolling and the percentage of enrolled clients completing training. Classes may include not only group-based activities but a parent-child interactive model to promote quality parenting and successful reunification for families.

Question Period ends on December 21, 2007