The University’s School of Social Work has plans to begin offering a minor program starting fall 2010.Social Work Dean Christian Molidor said the school decided to offer a minor to get closer to its goal of expanding its presence and potential for community outreach.”This is part of our strategic plan to become a bigger part of the University and to become a bigger part of the community,” Molidor said.The School of Social Work currently offers only master’s and doctoral programs. This is because of an agreement made with Southern University about 50 years ago, Molidor said. Southern was to offer a major in social work, while LSU would host the graduate programs.The agreement is no longer legally binding, but Molidor said it is still being upheld.”We still want to demonstrate our respect to Southern, our historic black college, and not compete with them,” he said.Denise Chiasson, assistant dean of the School of Social Work, said offering a minor is important in exposing the social work graduate program to students.”Many undergrads [have] no idea we have a master’s program” Chiasson said. “We’re hoping to give them exposure to what social work is, instead of some of the myths that are out there.”Erin Mire, social work graduate student, got an undergraduate degree in anthropology. Mire said she would have liked to learn more about social work before entering grad school.”You could get a better understanding of what social work is,” Mire said. “Grad school is a big commitment. [With a social work minor], you could see if it’s really something you find worth doing.”Minors are developed by “departmental, school or college faculties,” according to the University general catalog. The social work minor will have an 18-hour requirement, Chiasson said.Courses required for the social work minor will not be a scaled back version of the graduate program but rather a survey-type program set up to give students a feel for the field of social work.”The minor was developed so we could include everything from birth to death,” Chiasson said. “We will have courses on childhood, adolescence, adulthood and the elderly and several courses on crisis intervention and juvenile delinquency.”The social work minor would work well with a number of undergraduate major programs offered by the University, but Molidor said it would be best suited to a program dealing with human development, such as education or psychology.–Contact Ryan Buxton at [email protected]