Campus Connection

Nancy Jones, the face behind UWL class scheduling for four decades, retires in June

Nancy Jones was first hired for three days in 1969 to help register long lines of UW-La Crosse students who gathered in the Mitchell Hall gym to pick their classes. She became the voice of UWL’s touchtone registration system in 1994 when new technology allowed students to register by phone. And she’s marveled as technology has transformed the last 16 years, allowing students to register anytime, anywhere online. Jones will retire from UWL Thursday, June 30, after 46 years working in Records and Registration. A retirement celebration will be from 3-4:30 p.m. with a program at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, May 12, in Cameron Hall of Nations, Centennial Hall. Her start Jones was initially hired in 1969 when a family friend and her child’s godfather called, then UWL director of Human Resources Kurt Jostad. Someone had quit in the Records and Registration Office just days before registration. They needed someone to work for three days. Jones, a stay-at home mother, had never worked on a college campus and didn’t know anything about registration, but she decided to get a babysitter and give it a try. She’d make what she considered good pay back then: $1.78 per hour. After the first three-day stint, Jones was asked to help again with January registration and again the following semester. Being a limited term employee (LTE) worked well with her schedule with a child just starting in school, so she continued to come back to help with every registration and for longer periods of time. Jones moved up the ranks, becoming the manager in charge of hiring all of the LTEs who worked during registration. But when the university moved to the touchtone system in 1994, it no longer needed all the LTEs because students were no longer physically coming to one area to reserve their seats in classes. But the university would need someone to be the voice when students called in to reserve their spot via phone. Jones still has the massive, three-ring binder she used to record her voice saying every single class title, class number, department, time and room number for the touchtone answering system. The most tedious part was the 10 pages of numbers she read for checkout. She begins reading the page, “And 82 cents. And 83 cents. And 84 cents…” She doesn’t recall how long recording that entire script took. She just shakes her head as she pages through it. ‘I’ve loved the job’ Despite years of large registration crowds and long scripts, Jones has continued working in the Records and Registration office for her entire career. She’s always enjoyed the hustle and bustle, the students and faculty she comes in contact with and her co-workers. “I’ve loved being here and I’ve loved the job,” she says. “I’m always meeting students, faculty and staff.” She has coordinated class course scheduling, scheduling classrooms and/or computer classrooms for all academic departments, and scheduling rooms for mid-term and final exams. She has worked for four UWL registrars – Robert LeRoy, Gale Grimslid, Diane Schumacher and Christine Bakkum. She retired once already in June 2011, but was asked if she’d consider coming back to work on a special project that August to test and set up a new room scheduling software. As Jones nears her second retirement, she is still a master behind the scenes of class scheduling. All classroom and computer lab scheduling is done using this new software on her office computers. “It has been exciting to look at where we’ve been and how we’re doing it now,” she says. “The technology is just awesome.”