NRPA's cash cow: certification - @ Issue

Parks & Recreation, March, 2003 by Lonny Zimmerman

Has this happened to you? You hand someone your business card, and soon find yourself trying to describe what a CPRP is. At some point, you hear yourself explaining not that being a certified park and recreation professional is a certification of mastery, but one recognized by your national organization for evincing minimal competency.

Analyze any anomaly long enough, and you can find its roots. Study certification, and eventually it leads to making a little money. Consider: Certification costs $175 to sit for the exam, another $50 or so paid to NRPA or the state organization to maintain the CEUs for the next two years, and then a $50 renewal fee. That might not sound like much, but extend the certification train a little farther and you'll bump into the cash cow: conference registration and workshops.

I've sat on steering committees for state and national conferences, and one thing that becomes clear when you do so is that the training is CEU-driven. Offer CEUs, and they will come. Don't believe me? You could have the leaders of the National Therapeutic Recreation Society present a session at any given institute, while at the same time an entry-level professional presents on the value of watercoloring in a day program. Offer CEUs for the watercolors session and none for the leaders' presentation. You'll have six people listen to the leaders, and standing room only for the word on watercoloring.

Please don't think I am against certification; for starters, I'm certified. But consider my history. Despite having a post-graduate degree, I've never taken a recreation class. I worked three years as a game room supervisor at the Boys and Girls Club, and two for a municipal recreation division on the special events team. Then I sat for the CPRP test, and now I have cool letters behind my name on my business cards. Again, the CPRP designation recognizes minimum competency. When I was originally certified, I could shoot some serious stick, there wasn't an 8-year-old in the county who could challenge me at table tennis, and I could set chairs and tables up with the best of them. But a certified professional?

Or consider another prominent certification, CTRS, or certified therapeutic recreation specialist. For many in the therapeutic recreation world, it's the only certification of any concern. Now, I'm not a CTRS--I'm not eligible because in my six years of college I didn't take anatomy and physiology courses--so perhaps I'm naive. The fact that a recently graduated 21-year-old with a 16-week internship under her belt is recognized as eligible for certification doesn't bother me; after all, I hire such people. What bothers me is when I ask such a candidate in a hiring interview what her strongest quality is, and she responds, "I'm certified." Unfortunately, this attitude is the rule rather than the exception. Somewhere in academia our future professionals are being schooled to respect certification more than creativity, diligence, attention to detail and concern.

Certification is a wonderful concept. In practice, however, it's come to mean assuring minimal competency, rather than mastery. If you want to know why, follow the money.

Lonny Zimmerman, M.A., is field supervisor of adaptive recreation for Las Vegas, Nev. He can be reached at lzimmerman@ci.las-vegas.nv.us.