  The helicity-dependent strange quark distribution in the proton, $\Delta s$,
is calculated in a nonlocal chiral SU(3) effective field theory. The hadronic
proton to meson plus octet or decuplet baryon splitting functions are derived
at the one-loop level, with loop integrals rendered finite by correlation
functions introduced in the nonlocal Lagrangian. Within the convolution
framework, the proton strange helicity distribution is obtained using
spin-flavor symmetry to constrain the input valence quark distributions in the
hadronic intermediate states. The polarized strange quark distribution is found
to be quite small, with the lowest moment of $\Delta s$ negative, but
consistent with recent global QCD analyses.
