Sarah Henley
We’re the changemakers. We go out to help drive change within the community."
Sarah Henley graduated from TCC Health Careers programs twice: first from the Respiratory Therapy Program in 2005, and then from the Community Health program in 2022. After completing a Master’s degree in Public Health with a specialty in Global Disaster Management, Homeland Security, and Humanitarian Relief from the University of South Florida, she got a call from TCC asking, would she like to come back and teach?
When she was ready to start college, Henley lived just down the street from Olympic College in Kitsap County. She knew she wanted to be in medicine, and she also knew she didn’t want to be a nurse. So she started healthcare prerequisites at TCC, and applied for all of the non-nursing Healthcare programs.
“Respiratory Therapy got ahold of me first. I remember thinking, they’re going to find out I’m a fraud! I had no idea what it was,” Henley recalled.
As it turns out, respiratory therapists (RTs) are pretty used to people not knowing exactly what they do. The program chair recommended that Henley job-shadow an RT in order to get an idea of what the job entailed. Henley started the program, commuting across the original Narrows Bridge in a little VW while they were building the new bridge. A young single mom, she sometimes brought her son to class and to the program’s evening potlucks. He’s a chef now, and his younger sister is preparing to enter TCC’s EMS program.
“I still keep in touch with some of the students from back then, and from the Community Health program. They’re like, of course you’re the chair for that program!”
Henley graduated in 2005 and worked as an RT for 15 years. She enjoyed the work, but she began to realize that some of the problems she was seeing were systemic in origin.
“I started to see, in my RT practice, that the same patients were coming through again and again – and I realized that the problems that needed to be solved were not bedside problems, but system problems. That’s when I discovered Public Health.”
It was around that time that Henley got a call from one of her former RT instructors, Greg Carter, telling her that he thought she’d be a great candidate for TCC’s new Bachelor of Applied Science (BAS) in Community Health program. Henley started volunteering in emergency management in public health and entered TCC’s BAS program. It was lucky the BAS program had been designed to be fully online, because the pandemic started right around the time she started the program. While attending school she was also acclimating to a challenging new job; due to her background as an emergency management volunteer, Kitsap Public Health hired her to run their COVID vaccine clinic.
“The Community Health program did a good job of preparing me for my field,” Henley said. “Especially since it was right in the middle of COVID – it was crazy. As soon as I was learning something, I was immediately using it.”
After she graduated with a BAS in Community Health in 2022, TCC Healthcare Dean (then Community Health Program Chair) Brandon Censon suggested that she get her Master’s degree, and she enrolled in the University of South Florida’s program.
“Brandon was my advisor; he was so quick to respond,” Henley said. “Now that I’m in the shoes he was in, I’m like, OK, I want to be the kind of program chair he was.”
Henley says Carter was her biggest influence in RT, and Censon was her biggest influence in Community Health. Now that she’s a professor, she tries to pass what she learned from her two mentors on to her own students. As they take their first steps into the vast landscape of healthcare, she helps them find their paths.
“I ask, what are you passionate about? What’s landed you at my door?” Henley said. “It’s usually something in their history, or something in their current life, that makes them say, I want to help this particular group (like the unhoused), because I’ve been there. It’s almost a personal journey, usually something triggered it.”
For Henley, the move from Respiratory Therapy to Community Health was triggered by her asthma patients. When they’d come in needing care, they’d mention that insurance wouldn’t pay for their inhalers.
“I’m seeing some kind of injustice, and I want to be part of the solution,” Henley said. “We’re providing the education and the skills – the bonus is the degree – to go out into the world and be part of the solution. We’re the changemakers. We go out to help drive change within the community.”