The Northern Counties Consortium (NCC) combines training resources from the various participating counties and sponsors ongoing CWS/CMS training. Glenn County, as the fiscal agent, contracts with UC Davis to provide training and has a dedicated training lab for service delivery. Shasta County uses federal funds and social services realignment funds to pay for participation in the consortium.
The NCC provides training on the basic and advanced functions of CWS/CMS including referral processing, case management, documentation of case specific data (e.g., recording contacts, health and education information, child placements and court-related information), and creating case plans and court reports. Training is also provided on tools to improve child welfare performance on process/outcome measures (e.g., assessing whether federal/state requirements are being met, monitoring workloads and tracking performance) and to retrieve data (e.g., creating data extraction reports/queries). Utilization of CWS/CMS is a statewide requirement and collects information and data for Federal child welfare outcomes tracking.
There are a number of benefits to participating in the NCC CWS/CMS training consortium. Among those benefits are the number of trainings offered with a wide variety of topics that cover the breadth of functions that the system performs. This agreement also allows for the ability to do in-county trainings as well as a short travel time and limited travel costs involved in staff commuting to Orland for training, as compared to traveling to the Sacramento area for training. Finally, the NCC can work with UC Davis to customize trainings to the needs of northern rural counties.
The proposed agreement is retroactive due to receiving the updated list of available of courses from NCC late in the contract renewal season.