In January, walls go up on what will be the new home for Hero House, Colquitt County’ s child advocacy center.
“ As you can tell, we built this part. This is our interview room, our soundproof interview room, which is something that we had really struggled with in that old building because you could hear the traffic on First Street,“ she said.
She said if she was talking to a child, they could hear all of the
The new Hero House facility, which is being constructed from the ground up, is projected to be open at the end of May.
noise even though they had done all of the enhancements to the room that they could to try to make it soundproof. However, she said, only so much could be done in an old building.
The building that the agency is temporarily in was built last year, and they moved into it in October, she said. She said it was built in only four months and their contractor, Justin Murphy, built the building, spending a lot of time on the soundproof interview room.
“ And this building will actually connect to that building, so none of our funding is wasted. That will continue to be our interview room back there,“ she said.
She said, in 2018, they had eight board members and they were able to meet in the old location, but when they expanded their board number, they couldn’ t meet on the property.
“ I would have to call the annex for a meeting room or I would have to call the courthouse and ask for a meeting room,” she said.
In the new building, she said, they will have room for their monthly board meetings, as well as their monthly multidisciplinary team meetings.
“ But we will also be able to do some training with our local partners, which include law enforcement, DFACS, the DA’ s office, the school system,” she said.“ We do our protocol training. And our protocol is how we all handle our child abuse cases and how we all handle our medical exams.”
She said that they train their partners every year to make sure that everyone is on the same page, including the hospital, adding that the hospital had really partnered with them big since Hero House’ s medical facility was opened.
“ Our local doctors, our local ER’ s, they don’ t do sexual assault exam examinations be-
22 MoultrieScene APRIL 2025