In 2013, while I was still working at Tri-Cities Community Health in their Behavioral and Mental Health Services (I think that was after the name change, but I started there when it was called Nueva Esperanza), I had been working on obtaining my supervision hours to obtain my LICSW, with Jim Renner. He was a faculty at Heritage University, and as we were working on my licensure hours he invited me to do a presentation one day in class and then in the fall offered me the opportunity to teach a class on case management. One of my peers at the clinic was also teaching and she decided to step back and I started teaching her class.
Fall 2024, I stepped away from working as a program social worker at the Pasco School District, to take on a full time position as an associate professor in the newly started Master of Social Work program. Before making that step to full time, as I worked as an adjunct from that first class, I had taught 342 students over 8 different classes, and a total of 42 different class sections. As a full time faculty, those numbers are increasing rapidly. I led lots of groups throughout my career, and taught English when I lived in Peru. These all led me to think that I might like teaching, but after starting I really found out how much I love it. Not just the getting to help shape the students, but also seeing them out in the community making a difference with their clients. It was this, that when I started working on my Ph.D., I asked the school district if I could take a leave of educational absence so I didn’t have to give up all of my classes I taught as an adjunct.
When the position opened for the masters program, I knew that I had to go for it. I also felt very confident, as I had been so ingrained in the university for so many years and have been highly esteemed and valued for my work. I had actually already been helping with the start of the MSW program, and doing some consulting work on a school social work class. But it was also a chance, as the program was not fully accredited yet. I felt confident in the work we would do as a faculty (as Ruby Aguilar, our program chair, described it — the countless hours and hard work our faculty and staff invested in building this program). I am especially thankful to the students who took a chance and started their program when I did, without us being fully accredited.
It is a very proud moment to have our program validated by earning our national accreditation through the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). It has meant going through three site visits, submitting three different benchmarks (extremely large documents describing how we are meeting the accreditation standards). We got notice a couple of weeks ago that we had been approved, but have finally got the official certificate and the university made a formal public statement. It felt so good this week, as we brought our new incoming students for the 2026-27 school year to engage in their orientation, to tell them that we are now completely accredited. This third cohort of MSW students is the largest group we’ve had (containing advanced standing students, and students in both the first and second year of their two year program). I look forward to all of the great things they will do during their education and especially after.
You can find the public statement Heritage University Master of Social Work Program Earns National Accreditation
