Dr. Priscilla Scott, onetime state hospital aide turned counselor, honored for 50 years of state service

By Barbara Kessler, TJJD Communications —

Dr. Priscilla Scott, a mental health provider at TJJD, has worked in many capacities during her 50-year state career.

She has washed windows and waxed floors, taught crafts like leatherworking to state hospital patients, created patient satisfaction surveys, directed plays for drama therapy, conducted anger management groups, and lately, she’s been counseling boys and girls at the Mart campus.

Last Friday, the TJJD board honored her with a certificate and flag that had flown over the Capitol, recognizing her long service to Texas.

She remains committed, she said afterward, because “I love my job.”

“I love working with adolescents and I love the people I work with, and I have a new challenge to try to become a licensed sex offender treatment provider,” Scott said, explaining she’s training with another TJJD counselor.

“When I see the results, when they (the youths) have those ‘Aha!’ moments, it’s like, OK, they get it. That’s why I’m here. We cannot save everybody, but those who do, make a difference,” she says, pausing. “Yes, it’s extremely gratifying.”

Dr. Evan Norton, director of Treatment and Intervention Services at TJJD, said Scott continues to make an impact.

“Dr. Scott has had an incredible career with countless lives helped. She is creative, enthusiastic and has a wonderful sense of humor. The Mart team has been very lucky to have her, and I am thankful for her dedication to serving others.”

Scott was always oriented toward helping people. But she hadn’t received any of her degrees when she began work at Wichita Falls State Hospital as a young mother helping support her husband, who was in college, and their two kids.

“I worked the night shift and learned to administer medication, fold clothes, organize master files, roll cigarettes and drink black coffee,” she says in an autobiographical profile she wrote.

She assisted with group therapy and worked with psychologists who exposed her to the works of Maslow, Rogers and Skinner, piquing her interest in psychology.

Later, she worked in an annex of the state hospital in Vernon in chaplaincy services, where she provided guitar and piano lessons, and organized talent shows. Working alongside case managers and psychologists serving mental health patients and adolescent substance abusers, she realized she needed to complete her college education.

Once back in college in the 1980s, she continued her state service, working initially as a janitor at the Vernon complex, where she washed windows, waxed floors and cleaned toilets. She moved on to a position in recreation, where she taught leather working and helped patients make crafts. Later, she became a recreation supervisor at Vernon Center North and after that, worked at the renamed North Texas State Hospital in recreation and quality assurance. By then a jack-of-many-trades, she helped briefly with maintenance and learned to change the oil in lawnmowers.

Fast forward to 1999, when Scott completed her master’s degree in counseling, and her crazy quilt career coalesced around counseling. She found herself working in a variety of programs with youths at Victory Field, part of the Texas Youth Commission. But her focus was therapies using drama and music, a good fit for Scott, who had worked a side gig as a musical director for Vernon College musicals for 20 years. At the state facilities at Vernon, she helped both adults and youths loft theater productions, at one point producing a dinner theater called Death by Dessert.

She remembers training in TYC’s “Handle with Care” when the planes hit the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

In 2009, she retired from TYC and took a job back at the North Texas State Hospital providing trauma counseling to adolescents. She received her doctorate in 2016 and in 2018, she returned to the juvenile justice system to join the staff at the McLennan County State Juvenile Correctional Facility, in Mart. The move brought her closer to her grown son and daughter in the Houston area.

In addition to training to counsel sex offenders, Scott says she’s excited to be learning Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills and teaching Power Source groups.

She attributes her staying power, in part, to having had many effective supervisors who provided opportunities to learn “for which I will be forever grateful.”

“I cannot say enough about the training I’ve received. The training here (at TJJD) is so good. I’m constantly learning new things and that has been so energizing for me.”

“Sometimes we get stuck in old ways of helping kids that may not help them at all, so learning new ways of helping them is wonderful.”