2012 Annual Award Recipients

PDP Executive Director's Award

Lisa Futtner

Project Staff Associate

Regional Office Project Associate (ROPA)

Lisa joined PDP as an Education Specialist in 1989 working on the SCR Hotline Conversion Training. In 1993, she accepted a position as Project Staff Associate and moved to the Local District Permanency Planning project. Since that time she’s been involved in the design and development of many child welfare trainings, including the recent domestic violence training.

Over the past year, Lisa has quite busy in playing a major role to advance the OCFS Domestic Violence agenda by integrating it with family engagement practice. Family engagement is complicated when domestic violence is the cause of or contributes to child abuse/neglect and caseworkers have long needed guidance and support in this area to decide when and how to safely implement family engagement practice strategies. Lisa was well positioned to assist with this.

Recognizing Lisa’s strong interpersonal and organizational skills as well as her working knowledge of domestic violence practice, she was asked to head a workgroup charged with developing curricula on this topic which included practice guidance on moving the engagement agenda forward with families affected by Domestic Violence.

Lisa worked extremely hard to get the job done right. She worked with OCFS and staff at the National Resource Center for Child Protective Services to engage a nationally recognized expert to consult on the development of practice guidance. Lisa facilitated the ongoing collaboration between all parties, she drafted the guidance documents, supervised the development of 2 training DVDs, and a statewide teleconference done by PDP to introduce caseworkers and domestic violence advocates across the state to practice guidance. She brokered the resources for and organized 4 Domestic Violence Practice Forums for OCFS, bringing the expertise of national consultants on safe domestic violence practice to those administrators, caseworkers and domestic violence providers across the state to help them implement family engagement. Lisa also facilitated the development of a draft Child Protective Services Domestic Violence training, the first to be co-trained by staff from the Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence (OPDV) and a child protective services trainer.

In recognition of Lisa’s excellent work in developing resources addressing family engagement in cases with Domestic Violence concerns and for her many outstanding contributions to other projects and products in her 23 years at PDP including her participation in the team that established outcome-based Core training for New York State’s Child Welfare workers.

PDP Outstanding Team Award

Child Support Training and Outreach Project (CSTOP)

Dan Hill, Jeff Isaacson, Penny LaRocque, Laurie Lieman, Jan McCracken, Patty Mulberry, Lillith Stoessel and Kasa Wahl

The CSTOP team is being recognized for their work on the multi-dimensional conversion to the ASSETS accounting system. The team’s efforts to transition the 57 districts of New York State to a new child support management system clearly illustrates PDP’s mission of applying education and training to make a difference in a changing world.

Having announced in 2012 that the Child Support Management System (CSMS) would be completely shut down by August 2013 and be replaced with the Automated State Support Enforcement and Tracking System (ASSETS), OTDA’s Division of Child Support Enforcement sought CSTOP’s assistance in preparing the districts to embrace and move to the new system.

Though ASSETS has grown incrementally over many years and CSTOP staff have long offered training on ASSETS topics, districts had been allowed to use either CSMS or ASSETS to complete their work. At the onset of the transitions project, CSTOP staff knew they would encounter resistance from some end users who were more comfortable using CSMS.

Under the guidance of Penny LaRocque and Jan McCracken, a plan was developed to offer a webinar to Child Support Coordinators demonstrating the advantages of the ASSETS system. CSTOP members delivered an initial webinar to 148 participants. The program received such a positive reception that a second offering was scheduled for an additional 50 participants.

With such positive feedback on the webinar courses, the State Division of Child Support Enforcement requested that CSTOP further facilitate this transition at the Quarterly Child Support Coordinator conference and have follow-up online meetings using GoToWebinar.

As a result of CSTOP’s work, the state was able to wind down a major part of its old system, CSMS, and continue to move ahead in completing its transition to ASSETS. At the onset of this project, 151 workers had used ASSETS, now about 450 workers consistently use the new accounting system. A measure of CSTOP’s work is that most districts volunteered to go entirely to ASSETS, without hesitation.

PDP Outstanding Trainer Award

Lisa Whitney

Senior Education Specialist

Early Childhood Education and Training Program

Lisa is a Senior Education Specialist with the Early Childhood Education and Training Program and a lead trainer with the Early Childhood Education and Training Program’s Health & Safety Training unit. She is a highly dedicated and extremely hardworking individual responsible for training, monitoring, recertifying and general oversight of over 300 Health & Safety trainers across the state. Her training schedule also averages at least 95 days a year.

During this past year, Lisa has been instrumental in assisting in the development and delivery of 7 part Customer Service training for NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene. Despite minimal preparation time and content outside her area of expertise Lisa never complained about this additional work and found a way to produce high quality training and develop content proficiency in short order.

In addition, Lisa has been an outstanding coach and mentor for her coworkers as well as new trainers. Lisa’s training evaluations are consistently outstanding and there are frequent comments citing her as an ideal role model for other trainers. She has an excellent reputation with our sponsor and is held in high esteem by the Health and Safety trainers which can be verified by the positive comments we consistently receive.

Most notable is Lisa’s patience, sense of humor and compassion which combined with her commitment to work, makes her an exceptional employee and worthy of being recognized as PDP’s recipient of the 2012 Outstanding Trainer Award.

PDP Outstanding Professional Staff Award

Jessica Healy

Project Staff Associate

Finance & Adminstration

Jessica is a UAlbany graduate joined The Research Foundation in 2004 as a Project Staff Assistant working in the Medication Administration Training Program.

Jessica’s talents were readily recognized and she soon received a promotion to Assistant Manager of Administration in the Finance and Administration Unit. In January 2007, she received another promotion to Project Staff Associate and in July 2008, received a further promotion to the PDP Fiscal Operations Coordinator, the position she currently holds.  Her work in both the finance and human resource areas is consistently outstanding. Jessica’s strong organization skills and excellent attention to detail serve her well as she effectively and seamlessly juggles multiple activities on a daily basis. Overall, Jessica has done an outstanding job overseeing the daily operations of the PDP Finance office and has done a stellar job within the Human Resources area including coordinating all PDP recruitments.

Jessica serves on the campus Employee Assistance Program (EAP) committee and she has been active in organizing several of their campus-wide events as well as bringing other EAP programs to PDP such as last summer’s Olympic Experience.

Jessica is well deserving of this recognition for her consistent and outstanding contributions which help to further the PDP’s mission.

PDP Outstanding Administrative Support Staff Award

Corinne Kovatchitch

Administrative Assistant II

Child Welfare

Corinne was originally hired as a Secretary II in the New York Employment & Training Institute, funded by the Department of Labor. When that program ended in 2000, Corinne transitioned to a position in the Department of Child Welfare.

She brought her highly organized no nonsense approach to the Department of CW Training which meant that all assignments would be completed on schedule. She also became an expert in STARS and routinely helps to solve problems with the system.

Although she has worked on a number of different projects within Child Welfare, she is recognized today for her work on the Substance Abuse Education Project. This past year has been a transition year for this program, as a long tenured staff retired, and a newer staff member was assigned to the project. Corinne helped make this transition smooth by providing the new trainer with detailed information on local district contacts, voluntary agency information, and marketing materials.

Further, she proved again that she is efficient, detail oriented, helpful, accurate, and dependable.