March is Social Worker Month, and if anyone is looking for evidence as to the good social workers do, all they have to do is ask Raheem Simon and Matthew Flugence, 14-year-old students involved in St. Martin’s Juvenile Continuing Education Program.

The Juvenile Continuing Education Program is where the Kids in Care Program is based. Kids in Care contracts social workers to St. Martin Parish schools, brings inspirational speakers there and provides family and group counseling.

“Here teachers trust you,” said Simon. “They believe in you.”

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Flugence and Simon said what they’ve learned there has helped them deal with situations at home, on the street and on the basketball court differently than they would have before. The students learn new skills for dealing with problems and anger.

“They (the counselors) try to help you understand how you can fix it,” said Flugence.

Angel Huval, director of the Kids in Care Program, said kids at JCEP are the ones that need the counselors the most.

“Many times you don’t know if they’re getting it. For me, I just know that regardless of how they turn out, I planted the seed. I cared about them. And I hope they felt that,” Huval said.

Will Guidry, a New Iberia social worker for 28 years, said social workers look at the person as a “social being in the social milieu.”

“My job is to give you a map so you can help yourself,” he said. “The map is drawn with the help of the person’s values, beliefs and social perspectives.”

He said social workers do work as varied as consulting with the oil and aviation industries, crisis intervention at schools, hospices and hospitals and work with substance abuse. He said work with the less fortunate is traditional, but the idea that it’s all social workers do is a myth.

Annie Kibbe, GSW, is asocial worker doing short-term work at Dauterive Hospital.

“I enjoy it so much because every day it changes,” Kibbe said.

She works with psychiatric patients in the emergency room and mothers dealing with postpartum depression and families with a sick loved one, among others.

When he finishes with school, Simon wants to be a doctor. Flugence wants to be a veterinarian.

The social workers at the Kids in Care program help bring them a few steps closer to getting there.