It’s no surprise to anyone who spends any time in the schools bordering the path around the Falls that schools are a people business. A district can have bright, beautiful school buildings, but they can be cold, uncomfortable places if the people in those buildings do not show a caring attitude about the work they do and the young people they serve.
Promoting that caring attitude is a priority for the district. Customer service is job number one for each person working for the district, regardless of the role he or she plays. Each plays a key part in making the district a great place to work and a great place for students to learn — the primary focus of our business.
To help emphasize that philosophy, each year the district presents an annual distinguished service award to a support staff employee for outstanding performance in the district’s effort to provide a quality education for each student. The award was established in April 1994, 21 years ago. Since then, 21 recipients have been recognized, the most recent being Oconto Falls High School secretary Nancy Wolf. Her recognition banquet was held Friday night at JoJo’s.
Whether it is on the phone or in face-to-face encounters, she creates a lot of first impressions. By definition, that can only happen once, and she scores very high on the positive personality scale for people with whom she connects. She has been called a ray of sunshine, a great compliment that goes well with that office with all the windows.
Nancy commented recently that when she selected a career in office work, she had the impression that it would primarily be clerical work. However, once she started at OFHS, she realized that the role was more than just being a secretary with filing and typing activities. She found herself building positive connections with students who needed someone to talk to about life’s little problems. This can happen a lot with school office secretaries, regardless of where they work.
Her calm nature serves as an elixir to calm things down and lower the stress level in the office when things get tense. As an interesting side note, even though she is a high school secretary, she has many interactions with elementary students, since a major part of the district’s elementary summer school takes place in the high school.
Friday night’s event included a number of family and friends, along with four previous recipients of the award. Washington Middle School Principal Lou Hobyan, who worked with Nancy several years when he was at the high school, was the master of ceremonies and kept the program lively and fast moving. The event was a great tribute to one outstanding member of a great support staff that helps make the district an attractive one for families with school-aged children.
Speaking of great staff members, maintenance worker Bob Wirz pulled some extra duty Saturday at Abrams Elementary when the school served as a staging area for the Abrams, Gillett and Little Suamico fire department members when the former Methodist Church building was used for fire training. For several weeks, the building had been used for a variety of training activities, but the culmination came Saturday morning when crews went through the building with smoke training, followed by firefighting experience when a succession of burns took place.
The final burn was a controlled fire so as not to get too hot and endanger neighboring structures or the nearby power lines. The star of that show had to be Chris Bergh, the operating engineer who used the Jackie Foster backhoe to carve the building into smaller pieces so it would fall into the basement, where the fire could be contained.
His skill as an experienced operator could be admired as the backhoe danced around the building and gently tucked roofs, walls and floors into the basement. Perhaps the greatest applause from the crowd of spectators had to be when, with surgical precision, he was able to drop the bell tower structure into the center of the basement area.
Abrams Fire Chief Rick Race coordinated the day’s activity and clearly displayed his organization and leadership skills in that training session. This was a great partnership effort to get real-time experience for the firefighters and to help with the effort to clear the structure in preparation for the construction of the new entrance and parking area for Abrams Elementary. Even firefighting is a people business.
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