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Tina
Daniels
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Instrumental Educator
Tina Daniels
Dental Hygiene Professor, North Campus
In 1966, Ernestine Daniels received her diploma from Mount Airy High School in the Blue Ridge foothills of North Carolina. The school’s first black female graduate, Tina was determined to continue her education, “make a good living,” and achieve the highest goal possible in whatever field she chose.
After receiving a dental assisting certificate from the University of Illinois in Chicago, she studied dental hygiene at Meharry Medical College in Nashville and Columbia University in New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree in health science from Northeastern University in Boston.
Professor Daniels could have been satisfied to “make a good living,” but something always drove her to do more. Daniel’s father died when she was only 3 years old, leaving her mother to work and raise three children alone — yet she still found time to be fully involved in all of their activities, Daniels remembers. “My mom did everything for everybody. We grew up knowing that the thing to do was to help people,” she said.
It’s with that message of selfless giving in mind that Daniels personally renders dental care to the homeless through her work with the City Rescue Mission and uses her knowledge and intricate techniques to instruct in other parts of the world. Daniels is a 12-year member of the Jacksonville Sister Cities board. In 1999, with colleagues in Sister Cities, Daniels led efforts to launch and teach the first-ever dental hygiene education program in Murmansk, Russia. A more recent Sister Cities project took her to South Africa. A guest lecturer for Oral-B, Tina was able to obtain 3,000 toothbrushes donated by the corporation for children in Port Elizabeth.
Florida Community College offers the only dental hygiene program on the First Coast. Accredited by the American Dental Association, it is ranked among the best in the state. Professor Daniels’ 16-week instrumentation course is a challenging initiation to the rigors of the program. One of her students, Jay Scruggs, is already employed as a dental assistant in Jacksonville, and is working to take on the more advanced responsibilities of a hygienist. “Mrs. Daniels is an awesome teacher,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to learn this from anyone else. Her clinical skills are amazing. She inspires me to learn and be the best hygienist that I can be.”
