OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to an article about an award given to the Orillia Public Library, published Feb. 8.
In the recent article, the author and CEO Meagan Wilkinson kept calling a human services co-ordinator and a social services staff “social workers.”
Wilkinson (and/or the writer) makes the case that the woman mentioned in the article does “social work.” However, they do not seem to know that social work — both the title and role — are legally protected in Ontario. They can only be used by folks who have a four-year bachelor of social work and/or a related degree and a two-year master of social work at an accredited university.
I’ve spent 40 years training social work students and only those graduates have the right to call themselves social workers because they’ve completed the required education/training and are registered to do that work in Ontario.
Unless I am missing a vital piece of information that was not included in the article, these people that are described in the article and were hired by the library not only are not social workers; they cannot “do social work,” nor can they legally use the title or describe their work as “social work.” Social work has different registration and education requirements.
I therefore also doubt the accuracy of the statement in the article that other libraries in Ontario are hiring social workers. It’s more likely that they’re hiring human services and social services folks, who only require a two-year diploma instead of a four-year university degree, as they’re much less expensive to hire, particularly for non-profits. Those same grads are not trained theoretically in the same manner, intensity, or duration as social workers, nor do they have to achieve the same standards of practice.
Certainly, I agree with the philosophy and thinking behind this important role. I think it’s more humane and effective than hiring more security guards, but I do not like the writer and library CEO giving two-year college diploma recipients credit for being social workers when they are not. There is a reason for these strict social work regulations and educational requirements, especially when one thinks of the vulnerable people with whom we work.
I sincerely hope anyone hired in this role is not calling themselves a social worker because they are then breaking Ontario laws if they do so. I also hope that the CEO and your author, who I have since both contacted, would also refrain from making these inaccurate statements.
Dr. Susan Hillock
Orillia
