This school year, CHS administrative assistant positions have been reduced from five positions to three due to district-wide budget cuts. These remaining three administrative assistants have taken on the load that was once distributed among five secretaries.

Assistant Principal Marci Pieper explained that the administration team re-interviewed the five CHS administrative assistants to see if they had the necessary skills the new positions would demand, such as viewing the school’s financial system and being comfortable working with textbook tracker.

Administrative assistant Tanya Brooks said that her role has not changed much from the cuts, except that the job has become faster paced.

Brooks was originally skeptical of the changes.

“I did not want the change because I loved the departments that I worked with,” Brooks said. “I loved the people that I worked directly with everyday.”

Pieper also expressed her initial uncertainty with the change.

“We knew what we wanted it to look like, but we weren’t sure it was going to work with individual departments because teachers were nervous about getting what needed to be copied on time and who was going to get the bills paid,” Pieper said. “But the faculty has been very patient and have allowed us the time to work through the logistics of things.”

English teacher and department chair Jennifer Sellenriek said that the administrative assistant had a big role in their department.

“Ms. Jones knew what everybody was doing, in the sense that she was a unifying person,” Sellenriek said. “She knew who had what book checked out, she greeted people when they walked into the English office, and in many ways, she kept us together and upbeat.”

For Brooks, one of the best things the change has brought is the opportunity to get to know colleagues she hadn’t previously had a chance to interact with.

“It has allowed me to know other staff members in the building that I would not have probably gotten to know had this change not occurred,” Brooks said. “I think it also helped everybody in the building recognize we all have to work as a group and not just as individuals, even as individual departments, because everyone relies on everyone now.”

Brooks said one of the downsides to the change has been that all three of the administrative assistants had to adjust their way of doing things to accommodate the needs of all the departments.

“We were used to doing things our own specific way when we worked for individual departments,” Brooks said. “When myself, Ms. Manny and Ms. Jones came together, we all had to make adjustments to make our work effective for everyone.”

Sellenriek feels that the new changes have been difficult to get used to.

“We were used to working with an administrative assistant who anticipated our needs, and who would step in before we even knew we needed help,” Sellenriek said. “One of the biggest changes is that whenever we had subs, the administrative assistant would help the sub get settled in. Now when subs are here in the morning, I have to use my morning prep time to help them get settled in.”

 

Sellenriek hopes that in the future the District takes into account a teacher’s ease of teaching when making cuts.

“We need to go back and evaluate if the cuts are affecting our instruction,” Sellenriek said. “We need to look at if the cuts are affecting the stress level of classroom teachers in the future because that has a huge impact on us teaching.”

 

According to Pieper, there may be changes after the first quarter depending on how this new system was functioning.