Key state official has Warren County ties
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Though she only lived here three years during her school days, she said McMinnville and City High School’s basketball court stand out in her memory as places where she learned many valuable lessons.
“My career was shaped by McMinnville and its basketball program. I learned it takes a team to win, regardless of what you’re doing,” Child said. “I also learned that to succeed you have to work hard, be committed and know how to deal with people.”
Child said her family moved to town during her seventh-grade year, when her father was transferred here to take up assistant plant manager duties at Oster. She said she enjoyed her brief time here, making many friends and playing basketball.
“I had never seen a basketball before I moved here, but I decided I liked the competitive drive and tried out for the ninth-grade team,” Child said. “On the last day of cuts, coach Stewart told me ‘you’re terrible.’ He was tough. I didn’t have any natural talent, but I wanted to play and he gave me a chance, saying I could stay as long as I kept working hard.”
Her family left McMinnville at the end of basketball season her sophomore year. After graduating high school in Mississippi, she returned to Tennessee to attend college, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at MTSU.
Child’s professional career began at Austin Peay State University, where she was an instructor and women’s basketball coach. In the years that followed, she made her way to college administration and worked for such institutions as Western Kentucky, Southern Illinois and UT-Knoxville.
In 1998, she began a five-year stint in the Knoxville mayor’s office as Director of Policy, Development and Human Services. During this time she dealt with such environmental issues as waterfront development along the Tennessee River, which included greenway and water-quality issues.
Seeing her success with such projects, TVA recruited her to head its economic development division, which she did for six years. From 1999 until about a month ago she served as a senior vice president for Covenant Health, a Knoxville-based hospital system.
After assisting Phil Bredesen with his gubernatorial campaign last year, she was offered the job of TDEC Commissioner – a job she said she was honored to accept.
As commissioner she is in charge of the department whose responsibility it is to maintain and improve the quality of the state’s air, land and water. With 3,200 employees and an annual budget of $300 million, her diverse department also manages Tennessee’s 53 state parks, issues environmental permits, and works with local communities to protect cultural and natural resources.
In office only four weeks, Child said she is already faced with several big challenges, most notably slashing her department’s share of the state budget.
“That’s one the biggest challenges right now, reducing our budget by 9 percent. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve been able to work it out as a group,” she said.
Other challenges to be addressed, she said, include such environmental issues such as the ozone layer and air quality, what she calls “the signature issue over the next year.” She also wants to get the state’s parks back to the condition they deserve to be in and work with numerous other state departments to achieve the right balance on how to use the state’s many resources.