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       In order to chip away at a social worker shortage that hamstrung the District’s efforts this year to address the needs of some of its poorest residents, the D.C. Council this week approved a bill that would pay for dozens of graduate students to get their master’s in social work at the University of the District of Columbia.

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       Starting in the next academic year, Washingtonians who attend UDC’s graduate program will be able to receive a master’s degree fully paid for by the city — including the cost of books, the fee for licensing exams and a monthly stipend for transportation and other expenses — on the condition that after they graduate they will spend at least two years at a D.C. school, a health-care facility or working in homelessness outreach.

       Staffing shortages at the District’s social service providers came sharply into focus this year as D.C. worked to evict more than 70 people experiencing homelessness from the largest tent encampment in the city. At the time, officials blamed pandemic burnout, stagnant wages, a taxing work environment and pipeline issues that have precluded many Black and Latino applicants from becoming full-fledged case managers for its shortfall.

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       It was a problem homelessness experts said they were seeing around the country — even as the Biden administration has thrown a significant amount of money at homelessness, including $5 billion last year in American Rescue Plan funds for emergency housing vouchers.

       D.C. officials and the city’s nonprofit community have repeatedly blamed the caseworker shortage for slowing down the city’s rollout of housing subsidies that help low-income families and adults find safe and stable places to live.

       While many D.C. social services agencies have said the number of case managers has improved somewhat over the last several months, District officials have remained concerned about the long-term viability of programs that rely on social workers.

       Councilman Robert C. White Jr. (D), who introduced the Pathways to Behavioral Health Degrees Act this year, said to create long-term solutions to some of the District’s biggest problems, government agencies must get creative to address root causes.

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       “We spend so much time and resources triaging emergencies,” White said Wednesday. “If we want to solve problems, we have to look upstream and determine how we prevent them in the first place.”

       D.C. residents face long housing delays as 3,100 vouchers sit unused

       The UDC effort will fund the degree pursuits of 20 Washingtonians for the 2024-2025 academic year and 40 students per academic year thereafter. It will cost $6 million to fund the program over four years, according to the council.

       White said since he introduced the bill, he has had an overwhelmingly positive response from community members, who have told his office that they look forward to taking advantage of the offer.

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       “We really need people from our communities to help solve the issue in our communities,” White said.

       As of Nov. 1, there was a roughly 30 percent vacancy rate in the D.C. School Behavioral Health Program, according data from the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health tabulated by White’s office. Last spring, a workforce survey of members of the D.C. Behavioral Health Association found that on average organizations were seeing a 21 percent vacancy rate, contributing to the overall shortfall of 1,000 vacancies across 29 organizations.

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       The District’s Department of Human Services launched an effort called Operation Make Movement to expedite wait times for Washingtonians applying for housing subsidies by allowing paperwork to be submitted before a case manager had been officially assigned. Advocates said this change helped to get applications moving even as staffing numbers lagged. But the journey from when a person is approved for a housing voucher to the day they can move into an apartment still takes more than four months on average, according to D.C. government data — well beyond the goal set by D.C. and its partner agencies.

       “It is generally not the most popular political move to look upstream for solutions in the District, because politicians want to look as if they’re doing something to fix problems tomorrow,” White said. “The problems as complex as the ones we have in front of us aren’t going to be fixed tomorrow, and sometimes we need to be honest about that.”

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