Bringing fdelity monitoring to child welfare: lessons learned from the CORE Teen resource parent training Lori A. Vanderwill a , Angelique Day a , Alanna Feltner Williams a , Sue Cohick b , and Kris Henneman b a School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; b Spaulding for Children, Southfield, MO, USA ABSTRACT While a variety of disciplines regularly use fdelity monitoring in order to understand a program’s efcacy, few examples of fdelity monitoring exist within the feld of child welfare. This study provides an example of a fdelity-monitoring measure used the Critical Ongoing Resource Family Education (CORE) Teen, a training program for prospective and current resource parents of teenagers. The fdelity-monitoring tool provided valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the training program as well as possible explanations for changes (and lack thereof) in participants’ competency levels. While the lack of diverse trainers limits the generalizability of the fndings, this tool provides a promising start to fdelity monitoring in the child welfare feld. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 6 April 2020 Revised 7 December 2020 Accepted 8 December 2020 KEYWORDS Foster parent training; Child welfare; Foster parent; Fidelity Monitoring Introduction The current number of teens in foster care who need placements exceeds the number of available foster care placements in the United States (Wiltz, 2019). One way to address the lack of placement options is to increase resource parent (the collective term for adoptive/foster/kinship parents and guardians) recruitment and retention. An effective method for recruitment and retention involves providing resource parents with sufficient training, which can increase their ability to navigate uncertain situations in the resource parent role and improve outcomes for foster children (Chamberlain, Price, Reid, & Landsverk, 2008; Price, Chamberlain, Landsverk, & Reid, 2009). However, it is important to ensure that these trainings effectively deliver the appropriate content. Fidelity monitoring enables child welfare organizations to understand whether resource parents receive the trainings the way organizations intended. Program fidelity involves using tools to understand and improve the con- sistency and validity of an intervention (Baer et al., 2007). Understanding whether a program functions as originally intended improves standardization increases the knowledge regarding strengths and limitations of a certain CONTACT Lori a. Vanderwill lavand@uw.edu School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-4900. JOURNAL OF PUBLIC CHILD WELFARE https://doi.org/10.1080/15548732.2020.1862731 © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC