By Tiffany Crockett

Louise Boisvert, the Assistant Program Administrator of Child Welfare Services within the DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services) came and shared her experience and wisdom with our school January 27th in the Learning Commons. Last semester I took Philosophy in Action: A Course in Community Leadership. I greatly recommend you take it, yes you!

Part of the course’s final requirement was to use leadership skills using a service-learning project where one recruits people to help inform others about a subject that matters to them. Throughout this course I had a very humanitarian outlook so choosing Louise to enlighten the school on how we can help the youth was a no-brainer.

The Learning Commons located in the library was used for her presentation. It was a very cozy spot in comparison to the Jewett Auditorium when expecting a smaller audience. The turn out was small but proved to be very useful for the students that did attend; there were early childhood education students, developmental psychology students and a couple of criminology students!

Louise touched on all of the branches within the DHHS, the different types of abuse, what you can do as a witness and many more important and hard to speak of subjects. After this presentation it was very clear that Child Welfare Services has many shades of grey and it’s not an area that I think I could work in. Even as an art major this was information that I found very useful and mind opening… for example not just professionals are mandated to report child abuse but in fact any person that has assumed full, intermittent or occasional responsibility for a child have to by law report to the DHHS or the police. These people could be anywhere from a babysitter to a daycare worker.
To future students and professors: the Learning Commons was a great area to utilize and the many staff I recruited to assist me were wonderful and very helpful. Thank you to Lisa McDaniels for your guidance and for reserving the room. Thank you Owen Woods for setting up all the technological gadgets and many thanks to facilities for setting up the chairs! Here’s hoping that many students behind of me utilize this golden opportunity.