Social Work Students Rally for Paid Field Time and Fewer Hours

Washington Square News • By Dharma Niles • April 15, 2024

“Chelsea Trout spends eight hours every Monday at a charter high school in Brooklyn, where she answers phone calls, proctors SATs, oversees school lunches and handles a clinical caseload of 10 students, before heading back to Manhattan for two classes at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. Trout, a first-year master’s student at Silver, said she had to pick up two additional jobs to sustain herself financially while studying and interning.

As a part of the school’s Master of Social Work program, Trout is required to spend 1,200 hours in a field work, or practicum learning, position — most of which are completely unpaid. Trout is one of many who do not have a say over where they are placed, and said that many of the over 600 different organizations Silver partners with have become reliant on student social workers for ‘free labor.’

In recent years, students attending social work programs across the country have started to organize for paid field placements and fewer required field hours in a movement called Payment 4 Placements. While Silver has announced that it will lower its practicum learning requirement to 900 hours — the minimum allowed by the Council on Social Work Education — starting in fall 2024, many students are also calling for the school to find a way to pay them for their field hours, either through government funding or NYU’s own budget.”

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