Though unheralded, social workers serve an indispensable function in American schools. The rise of social work in education matched the expansion of public education, an expansion that began at the turn of the 20th century. Today, social workers have become crucial to the American educational system, even as their mission has become increasingly complicated by regulation and seemingly intractable problems such as drugs, violence, and broken homes. This paper will briefly examine the history of social work, then discuss some of the legal issues that social workers face everyday in America's schools.
School social work began in 1906, as private agencies sprouted up to help underprivileged youth in three eastern cities (Hartford, Boston, and New York). In 1913, the school board in Rochester, New York initiated the first public social work program. The school board created the program because factors ôoutside of school are to be found which will often thwart the school in its endeavors.ö The school board recognized that social workers (which they called ôvisiting teachers) were needed as ôan attempt on the part of the school to meet its responsibility for the whole welfare of the childö (Allen-Meares, 1996, p. 24).
Scholars have cited three influences to explain the emergence of school social work. First, America's public schools experienced a huge influx of students at the beginning of the 20th century. Education had not been a priority in the agrarian America of the 19th century, but urbanization and waves of immigration pushed the nation towards compulsory education in the 1900s. Second, all of those immigrants highlighted the diversity amongst school children that traditional schools were not equipped to address. Language differences and cultural differences combined to overwhelm schools that were not set up to deal such issues. Third, the nation as a whole had come to recognize the importance of education, espe...