The purpose of the project was to develop an advanced, competency-based training program for residential youth service/child care workers providing services to children and adolescents with severe mental health or emotional problems. The program was designed in response to problems common to these workers in rural areas such as Kansas, including significant barriers to educational opportunities due to geographic distance, working hours, financial constraints, staff coverage, and low incentive, and role confusion, burnout, and habituation to institutional life. The project provided an intensive, week-long instructional workshop followed by a supervised and self-directed internship in the student's home agency. A final workshop evaluated program effectiveness. The program provided students with 10 hours of college credit. The report consists of three parts: an executive summary; a curriculum consisting of a case study, specific competencies in the areas of workers' responsibilities to themselves, the child, the group, the agency, and the community, performance contracts, and a bibliography of 59 items; and a final descriptive and evaluative report of the program. (MSE)