Warren Watts Receives Alumni Professional Achievement Award from McDaniel College

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Warren Watts credit: McDaniel College

WESTMINSTER, MD (10/25/2013)(readMedia)-- Warren Watts of Hedgesville, W.Va., has received the alumni professional achievement award from McDaniel College. He is a 1962 alumnus of the college.

Presented annually during McDaniel's Homecoming, the alumni professional achievement award is presented to a graduate who has gained distinction in his/her chosen field or profession and whose accomplishments reflect admirably on McDaniel College.

Watts majored in English at Western Maryland (now McDaniel) College before graduating from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., in 1966 with a Master of Divinity degree. He is an ordained Elder in the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Watts began his counseling career during his time in the ministry and went on start Tri-County Pastoral Counseling Services in Martinsburg, W.Va., a marriage and family counseling practice. Before retiring from there in 2008, he had counseled 45,000 individuals, including 8,500 children and youth who have been physically and sexually abused.

He has served as an expert mental health professional for 2,500 court appearances, and for this received a Certificate of Recognition and Appreciation from the 23rd Judicial Circuit Court of West Virginia. His years of service in the court system also earned him Diplomate status by the American Academy of Forensic Counselors.

Watts received the Outstanding Professional Achievement Award from the West Virginia Counselors Association in 1998. In 2003, he was selected from a pool of 2,000 mental health professionals to be one of three special investigators assigned to the West Virginia Board of Examiners in Counseling to oversee all counseling professionals in the state. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Counseling from the Mountain State Counselor's Alliance in 2004. The American Biographical Association also named him Man of the Year in 2006. Out of everything, however, Watts considers his appointment as Chaplain for the Day at the U.S. Senate by Senator Robert Byrd one of his greatest privileges; he was only the second minister from his state to receive this honor.

Moreover, he has been an adjunct faculty member for three universities, where he helped train graduate students in marriage and family counseling. For the past 23 years, Watts has written about counseling issues in his weekly "Counselor's Corner" column that deals with individual, marriage and family counseling topics.

Currently, Watts serves as health consultant and case manager for Berkeley, W.Va., County Schools and Chaplain of his local Fraternal Order of Police.

For more information about McDaniel College, visit www.mcdaniel.edu.

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McDaniel College, recognized nationally among "40 Colleges that Change Lives" and U.S. News top-tier liberal arts colleges, is a four-year private college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 25 highly regarded graduate programs. Its hallmark faculty-student collaborations in research, teaching and mentoring plus hundreds of leadership and service opportunities enrich a lively learning experience that is rooted in a personalized interdisciplinary and global curriculum. Innovative January courses take students to points all over the world while McDaniel's degree-granting European campus offers a unique opportunity for international study at the only American university in Budapest, Hungary. A diverse and close-knit community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,560 part-time graduate students, McDaniel also boasts a spectacular 160-acre hilltop campus in Westminster, Md., an hour or less from Baltimore, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, an Amtrak station and BWI international airport.