Tim Herrington grew up well-acquainted with Georgia Highlands College. His mother graduated from the college while it was known as Floyd Junior College, and his brother and sister later earned degrees from Floyd College.<\/p>\n
However, college was far from Tim\u2019s mind in his younger days.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was younger, I dreamed of being a professional football player,\u201d Tim said. \u201cI was really enthusiastic and dedicated to achieving this goal until reality forced me to look at the number of young men worldwide that also had that same dream and only a very small percentage actually achieve the distinction.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Realizing he needed to become more responsible and self-reliant, Tim enlisted in the military.<\/p>\n
\u201cI joined the Army, and for the next seven years I focused on that,\u201d Tim said.<\/p>\n
After being honorably discharged, Tim returned to Floyd County where he started a career with Floyd County\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
\u201cI actually began my career in May of 2003 as an unpaid volunteer rescue volunteer with emergency management,\u201d Tim said. \u201cI was working full time with the Floyd County Public Works and volunteering on the weekends with emergency management.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
His dedication to public service coupled with skills developed in the military led to a full-time career with Floyd County Emergency Management, with Tim eventually being named director of the department in 2014.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy favorite part is the community events that we participate in, which vary from the Wings Over North Georgia Air Show, balloon festivals, fireworks, Christmas parade, and summer camp programs,\u201d Tim said. \u201cThese events afford me the opportunity to meet and interact with the community and share preparedness information, and ensure the community is prepared for emergencies that could affect our area.\u201d<\/p>\n
After nearly 30 years of being out of school, Tim was able to follow in his family\u2019s footsteps of attending Georgia Highlands College, with the help of a scholarship from the Community Criminal Justice Foundation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cGHC made it financially possible to go to college and make that transition after being out of school for almost thirty years,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has given me the opportunity to demonstrate and lead by example and show the importance of education regardless of age.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tim earned his associate degree from GHC in 2016, but he doesn\u2019t plan to stop there.<\/p>\n
\u201cGHC rekindled my desire to push myself and continue to explore my options in education,\u201d Tim said. \u201cI have since enrolled in the bachelor’s program for emergency management at Jacksonville State University.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an emergency response director, Tim has experience regarding preparation for situations such as COVID-19.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually started planning back in 2006 and that is was when we were planning for the H1N1 virus that was so prevalent at that time,\u201d Tim said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have any issues here stateside. In 2009 we changed over for pandemic planning for Ebola virus, and again, we didn\u2019t have any significant issues here.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As time passed, Tim said, planning for a pandemic was set aside as the department, and nation, dealt with other issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce we started seeing what was going on in China, then we kind of started to have to pull out the plan and dust it off,\u201d Tim said. \u201cThe issue we\u2019re having is a lot of the planning that we had for H1N1 virus and for Ebola, the plans generally incorporated some sort of vaccine being available. With COVID-19 we haven\u2019t developed a successful vaccine yet that we\u2019re able to release to everyone, so that\u2019s been a struggle for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tim said he has witnessed goodwill during this time as local communities have come together to face the threats associated with COVID-19.<\/p>\n
\u201cFortunately, we have had a lot of folks within the community to step up and donate several items,\u201d Tim said. \u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of people call, email, or text me messages and tell me about different contacts they have that we\u2019re able to access and try to acquire those resources as well. I get emails from other states, people who have businesses who have stopped manufacturing what they normally do and send out equipment to us just wanting to help.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As everyone works toward the eventual reopening of business, schools, and governmental services, Tim said the key is to continue doing what has been proven to work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe main thing is to help get the word out and tell people social distancing is working,\u201d Tim said. \u201cI know it feels like you\u2019ve been cooped up, especially with the kids. I have grandkids and they want to see their friends and they want to go and play and go to birthday parties and all that, and at some point when this is all over we hope that we\u2019ll be able to go back to all that. But for right now, we just need to keep encouraging everyone to keep doing what we\u2019re doing. It\u2019s working, and at some point we\u2019ll going to get through this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Tim Herrington grew up well-acquainted with Georgia Highlands College. His mother graduated from the college while it was known as Floyd Junior College, and his brother and sister later earned degrees from Floyd College. However, college was far from Tim\u2019s mind in his younger days. \u201cWhen I was younger, I dreamed of being a professional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":9984,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9983"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9986,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983\/revisions\/9986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highlands.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}