No other group of people has as much daily chaos as teenagers. Good thing for them, Jessica Carpenter – Highland’s new social worker — embraces the chaos.
“I just love the chaos that is the teenage brain. I feel like I fit better, and I don’t have to be so serious,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter, as a social worker, is at Highland to work with students and help them know that it is ok to get help when they need it.
Carpenter first found her passion for helping people when a counselor in her high school helped her though some difficult times.
“Having someone help me through a hard time kind of sparked me to do the same,” Carpenter said.
She didn’t start pursuing social work until she took an intro to social work class at Utah State University that made her confident it was the right field for her. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree and then was accepted into an accelerated program to get her master’s degree in just a year and a half. She has professional training in five different branches of her field: motivational interviewing, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, internal family systems, dialectical behavior therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy.
She used these skills in the multitude of jobs that she had before landing at Highland. She worked in the scholarship office at USU and then spent some time working for the courts. After that she was the clinical director at a residential facility that treated men that have schizophrenia and bipolar and ran an early intervention program at the VOA (volunteers of America) for kids who were showing signs of hallucinations, paranoia, and schizophrenia.
Throughout her careers she worked with all ages but applied to work at a high school so she could exclusively work with teenagers again.
She hopes to connect with students and the staff at Highland to make a community that feels safe to get help when people need it. Her vision includes an additional room in Highland where students can take a break from the anxiety of school. Using all her experiences in her work, she hopes to create a space where students know they will be heard and understood.
“There is not a lot of things that I haven’t heard before and it’s a judgment-free zone,” Carpenter said.
