School Social Work: Now More Than Ever

John Lennon once sang in his song “Beautiful Boy,” “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” I’ve been thinking about this lyric a lot lately, as we all continue to grapple with this pandemic.

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In early March, we were excited to publish our 5th volume of the International Journal of School Social Work, marking five continuous years of the journal’s publication. This issue arrived at a crucial time for our schools and communities around the world, and in this brief essay attached in this article, I argued that it’s never been a more exciting and consequential time to be a school social worker. Then my state of Illinois shut down, schools went to e-learning, and our national SSWAA conference was postponed, among many other changes that we’re all still reeling from.

That this essay, “SSW: Now More than Ever” was published just days before a good portion of our country went on lockdown due to COVID-19 only further deepens and highlights the urgency of making SSW research, policy, and practice central to the work we’re all needing to do right now. In this essay I also highlighted the abstracts of the research articles we published in Volume 5 of the journal, and in the spirit of continuing our SSWN Open Access 2020 theme, we will be featuring those articles and other open-access research more in the coming months, along with all the other content we’re providing here and on our sister social media platform SSWNetwork, where there are now 4,500 of us.

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