During a social work internship last year, Mike King had to decide between what he considered two poor choices in a child custody case. He could recommend to a Maine District Court judge that a child continue living with one parent or change the primary residence to the home of the other. Both situations were problematic.

After meeting with family members, mental health workers, teachers and others, King chose what he considered the lesser of evils. As a volunteer Guardian ad litem, he recommended the other parent be assigned custody.

King, a master’s social work student from Brewer, Maine, is one of five University of Maine graduate students who participated in the newest, perhaps most challenging internships the School of Social Work has developed to apply classroom lessons to real-life experiences.

Of more than 100 human services, mental health or community agencies that serve as field education sites for UMaine social work students, a district court Guardian ad litem internship, serving as an advocate for low-income children in contested divorce and child custody cases, can be an intense, often emotional introduction to the harsh world of disrupted families, abused or neglected children and sometimes domestic violence.

Each semester, up to three School of Social Work graduate students who opt for the one- or two-semester internships go to Augusta, Maine, for 30 hours of special training in mediation, court procedure, family dynamics, interview techniques and report writing to become Guardians ad litem. They can spend up to 16 hours a week on cases, interviewing children and the people who know the youngsters to gain perspective on what living arrangements will best serve them in the future.

The UMaine students become active participants in court proceedings, looking out for the children of embattled parents, calling witnesses and making recommendations about a child’s future.

UMaine Guardians ad litem have been working in district courts in Penobscot, Piscataquis and Hancock counties, with expansion expected to Kennebec and Waldo counties.

“They’re actually the arm of the court and the voice of the child,” says Nancy Kelly, field coordinator for UMaine’s School of Social Work. The work, she says, “is all about the best interests of the child. They look at the situation from multiple perspectives and make a recommendation to the court.”

According to Kirsten Skorpen, the District Court System’s Family Division resource coordinator who oversees the training in Augusta, there is no other program like it in the courts’ overtaxed Family Division in Maine.

“One of the wonderful things about this collaboration is that it’s provided the courts a chance to collaborate in a meaningful way with the School of Social Work,” Skorpen says. “What I like about (this program) is it really broadens a multidisciplinary perspective. It really brings it into the courtroom and into families’ lives, and enriches the outcome and informs the court in a very positive way.

“It’s a pretty innovative project.”

Skorpen estimates that roughly 5,000 divorce and parental rights cases with children involved are brought before the court annually. While many of the parents are able to come to agreements over their children’s best interests, some cases require the assistance of a third party, a Guardian ad litem.

To protect the interests of children in those cases, the court system has a roster of about 350 Guardians ad litem, mostly lawyers or mental health workers who charge $80 to more than $200 per hour for their work. Some Guardians ad litem assist low-income families on a volunteer basis, but many child custody decisions are made with little or no background research.

The availability of student Guardians ad litem from UMaine helps the state with an overwhelming caseload of contested, often angry, divorces, in which hundreds of low-income children caught in the middle otherwise would have no one doing background research and making recommendations on their behalf.

“It’s an amazing experience for the students,” says adjunct social work faculty member Deborah Mattson, a UMaine alumna and certified mediator and Guardian ad litem who supervises and meets with the students on a weekly basis.

“They’re learning so much. They’re learning family systems theory. They’re learning about child development. They’re learning about the dynamics of conflict, community resources, and they’re learning about working collaboratively with other professionals, and about the court system,” she says.

The novel internship program was born from a chance meeting and casual conversation two years ago between School of Social Work Director Robin Russel, a former children’s attorney, and Maine District Court Chief Judge Ann Murray.

When Judge Murray expressed concern at the lack of advocates for low-income children in divorce cases, Russel saw an opportunity to expand the social work internships into a field seldom visited by college students.

MSW student Kassie Merrill from Peru, Maine, was one of the first to sign up for the internship, and later helped Russel obtain a grant from the Maine Community Foundation to help pay students’ travel expenses and Mattson’s stipend. Merrill says the comprehensive training and experiences she had, including grant writing, enabled her to land a job even before she graduated.

“It’s been invaluable in marketing myself. I got a job almost immediately,” says Merrill, who graduated in August and plans to continue as a registered pro bono Guardian ad litem, even with her full-time job at Acadia Hospital in Bangor, Maine.

Mike King, who plans to become a clinical social worker in public schools, says understanding the “whole psychosocial picture of an individual and family unit” was a particularly valuable experience.

“I’ll definitely take that with me, and when I work with children in the future,” he says, “I’ll remember there are many more dynamics involved with children.”

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Helen Mattsson: We are investigating this animal because it has the ability to make its own food. In our lab, sea slugs with enough light can live nine months without eating. So, we are investigating what processes allow that to happen and how did these sea slugs acquire the genome they needed to do this.

Susan Devine: We are hoping to find out that some of the algae genome that — because the algae itself obviously can photosynthesize, that’s how it survives — we are hoping to find that some of this genome has actually passed across all the barriers and incoporated itself into the sea slug so that the sea slug can actually function like a plant.

Helen Mattsson: If we wait a little while they might open up. They open up like leaves. We can see how they increase their surface area to capture the sunlight and that is what enables them to use the chloroplast effectively.

Helen Mattsson: This is a really unique opportunity. Our project focuses on the bacteria that live in association with this sea slug to see if they contribute any essential nutrients. And this is not research or even the scope of a project that we would be able to take on if we weren’t doing our senior thesis research in this lab.

Susan Devine: I think it’s just an opportunity that not many undergraduates have. And that we’ll be able to take this out to the workforce and say that we have worked through an entire project. We have learned how to do so many different techniques. We have worked with other people. We have worked independently. And it’s just something you don’t normally get to do in your four-year experience before you’ve moved on. This is more like opportunities that masters students get. So, it’s really great to be able to do it in a small lab by ourselves right now.

Louis Morin, Instructor, School of Forest Resources: “The first object is to provide the students with training so that they’re more comfortable when they go out for a job that they’ve seen and used equipment, and they’re familiar with it. And as far as the park is concerned, we’re trying to help them solve a problem they have. They don’t have the resources to restore what we call the vistas along the Carriage Roads. The very difficult ones that are extremely steep to access, we can do that with the equipment that we’ve designed and it gives the students a lot more experience in difficult situations.”

Tucker Pearson, Forest Operations Major: “Right now we are working on a certain section where you can see the mountain range in the background and basically trying to open up the trees around here in this area so you can get a better view of it. Trying to restore it back to how it was back when the Carriage Trails were first put in by the Rockefeller Family.”

Louis Morin, Instructor, School of Forest Resources: “What’s unique about the way we cut the vistas, perhaps versus what others might do, is we try to make them look as natural as possible. So, we carefully select each tree that is being removed and we make sure not to make what we call a “square box” that if you are coming along looking at the vista, it looks natural and that’s what we are trying to accomplish. And the students get involved in that process as well; they help us select the trees that are going to be removed.”

Jonathan Gormley, Volunteer Coordinator, Acadia National Park: “You’ve got ocean views, mountain views, but nature isn’t static. Trees grow up, plants come in, plant communities change and to keep those vistas as the Carriage Roads were originally designed requires work.”

Tucker Pearson, Forest Operations Major: “There’s a lot of just knowing what trees would be good to cut. I mean, we are trying to thin–you know, there’s a snag right here that we will leave as kind of a wildlife tree, and there’s other trees. You know, you don’t want a complete clear-cut of acreage, you want some growth so you will have some regeneration on the small scale.”

Louis Morin, Instructor, School of Forest Resources: “We’re concerned about the quality of work that we do. We want to set a good example for people visiting these roads to see how well they can be maintained.  The work that we do is well-known within the park system.”

Jonathan Gormley, Volunteer Coordinator, Acadia National Park: “It’s everybody who benefits from that. The park benefits because we get the work done. The visitor benefits because the vistas are maintained, and the university students benefit because they then get practical experience that would be hard for them to get otherwise.”

Tucker Pearson, Forest Operations Major:  “The best part about this is that we have, like, our measurements class and everything, the forestry majors.  Being able to take that information and put it to a practical use is, I mean, really rewarding. This is awesome–I would recommend it to anybody.”