Support Systems for Educationally Disadvantaged Students and Assuring Practitioner Competence

This paper addresses itself to an assessment of a number of student support systems developed and utilized in a three-year training effort with more than 104 Native American social work students at the School of Social Work, University of Utah. While a number of social support systems utilized in the program are mentioned, special consideration is given to those in recruitment, communication, modeling, counseling, follow-up, student involvement, and discriminating education. The article could have relevance for the social work training of any disadvantaged student.