Mid-Week Mugging is a series of features by BayToday. Each Wednesday, we will run a profile on a local business or organization that will be "mugged" with BayToday coffee cups. The subjects will then "mug" for our camera and we will tell a little bit about their story.
This week, after urgings from various students, parents, and staff, and in honour of the last week of the school year, Alliance French Immersion Public School's amazing office administrators are being recognized for their contributions to the school community. Here's to Pam and Geraldine, and all those who help our schools run so smoothly.
Spend some time in any school's busy administrative office and you will see the responsibility and care with which its assistants handle the demands of phone calls, staff inquiries, student care, and more.
Spend five minutes with office administrators Pam Nelson and Geraldine Zuccherato at Alliance French Immersion Public School and you will witness two women working in concert, multi-tasking, and making sure that everyone is where they are supposed to be, at the right time, all with welcoming smiles on their faces, while also remembering every person's name as they walk through their doors.
Ah yes, the names. They know them all. Students, staff, parents, couriers, pizza delivery drivers, and countless others. The two figure it usually takes them a month or two to learn the names of the new crop of JK students. By the time those JK students move on from grade six at the school, the two have sometimes seen so much of those children that they begin to consider them as their own extended family.
The two admit that matters do get a little misty at this time of year when the graduating class prepares to move on to new schools. "I find they stay the same for two years, and then they grow, and then they stay kind of the same, then they come back after a summer and they've changed," said Geraldine. There are several dozen students who the two have seen complete eight years from JK to sixth grade in their time at Alliance.
The job has evolved into something more than the textbook definition of attendance, bookkeeping, purchasing for the school, and looking out for the welfare of the students, as Geraldine put it. A teacher from the school entered the office and, overhearing the question, added, "nurses, counsellors to adults and children, therapists." Add social workers to that description, and the two admit that is closer to reality.
The two are the front-line buffers between the outside world and the school. Besides what happens in the classrooms (and sometimes that, too), there is not much that goes on at Alliance that these two do not know about.
Asked how they stay on task with so much activity going on around them, Pam replied, "We are really good at filtering." Geraldine added, "there are the regulars, the frequent office visitors," but we have a good triage system to keep them moving through.
In the five minute period shortly before quitting time at 4 p.m., the two answered phones, gave first aid to a student, did some accounting, arranged for a ride for the injured student, spoke with several teachers and a vice principal, all while answering questions for this interview. They took turns spreading their attention around, completing each other's sentences as they went, a team in perfect harmony.
"We don't have each other as friends on Facebook, there's no need, we spend enough time together right here," Pam said with a smile.
To read our inaugural Mid-Week Mugging, click here.
