DSS gets new award from ECU

Published 5:30 pm Thursday, May 16, 2013

By Mike Voss

Beaufort County’s Department of Social Services has a new award to hang on one of its walls.

The department received the 2012 East Carolina University School of Social Work Outstanding Field Agency Award.

“This is an award that recognizes your agency’s commitment and dedication to educating social work interns,” reads a letter from Janine Jason-Gay, field coordinator and teaching instructor with the School of Social Work.

The department earned the award because of the important role it played in helping student interns develop as professional social workers, according to the letter.

‘The field education experience is the cornerstone of professional social work education and your agency created a supportive internship environment that allowed student interns to integrate social work theory into their practice experience,” Jason Gay wrote.

Sonya Toman, director of the county’s Department of Social Services, expressed her pride in the department’s new “bragging rights” in an email.

“This is a new award that was inspired by feedback from our Social Work interns (BSW & MSW) as they described an agency that was supportive with a positive culture. They nominated us for the award,” she wrote.

The department had eight ECU social-work interns during the semester just ended.

About Mike Voss

Mike Voss is the contributing editor at the Washington Daily News. He has a daughter and four grandchildren. Except for nearly six years he worked at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., in the early to mid-1990s, he has been at the Daily News since April 1986.
Journalism awards:
• Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, 1990.
• Society of Professional Journalists: Sigma Delta Chi Award, Bronze Medallion.
• Associated Press Managing Editors’ Public Service Award.
• Investigative Reporters & Editors’ Award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Public Service Award, 1989.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Investigative Reporting, 1990.
All those were for the articles he and Betty Gray wrote about the city’s contaminated water system in 1989-1990.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Investigative Reporting, 1991.
• North Carolina Press Association, Third Place, General News Reporting, 2005.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Lighter Columns, 2006.
Recently learned he will receive another award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Lighter Columns, 2010.
4. Lectured at or served on seminar panels at journalism schools at UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Mary Washington University and Francis Marion University.

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