A time to B. Wild and a time to retire from LPS
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By MARGARET REIST / Lincoln Journal Star
Her license plate says BWILD.
That’s Becky Wild’s name, of course, and the way she signed every memo and letter she ever penned at Lincoln Public Schools over the past 30 years.
But knowing only that misses the point, overlooks the real significance of the plate.
It doesn’t explain why it’s so dang perfect.
To really get it, one must know the woman who bolted it to her car, must realize the inspiration was not her name so much as the student who would see her and always sing the rock ’n’ roll classic “Born to be Wild.”
Those who squeezed into the district’s board room for her retirement party last week, who spilled out the doors and into the halls, get it.
They’ve worked with Wild, who’s been director of student services for 13 years, long enough to tell stories, like the time a colleague walked into her office to discover her doing a snoopy dance around the room.
Her colleagues have known her long enough to be sure when they ask a question and get the answer “I really don’t know, but ... ,” they can almost count on the guess that follows to be right.
They know, from experience, that all of Wild’s energy, her blunt honesty and passion, have been directed toward one thing during her tenure at LPS: students.
She was an advocate, say colleagues. Always. Even when she thought she was the only voice there.
“Up until her retirement, the question was always ‘Is this good for students? What should we do for kids?” said Thomas Christie, LPS multicultural school/community administrator.
That’s why, for the crowd in the board room last week as well as the guest of honor, it was a bittersweet event.
Because it wasn’t just her colleagues who hated to see her go. She didn’t want to leave either.
But fate had other plans, ones that kept her in doctors’ offices as much her own. So she did what she thought was right.
A very BWILD kind of move.
n n n
The day before Thanksgiving 2006, Wild was hip deep in family and food when she began seeing blue and red flashing lights.
She’d been exercising when it started, and then she noticed she was having trouble with peripheral vision on one side.
She took a couple of aspirin, figured she’d deal with it after the Thanksgiving festivities.
That night, it was too painful to lie on her right side. The next day, the symptoms remained and she started bumping into things. She told her sister and they went to the emergency room.
Before long, tests told her it was a brain tumor. Just like that.
“That was it,” she said. “It changed my life.”
She cried and she kept working. She found doctors she trusted and leaned on her family.
Over the next two years, she had brain surgeries, pinpoint radiation treatment, chemotherapy and radiation. After a second surgery this summer and more chemotherapy, she decided her absences weren’t fair to those who work in student services.
“It’s time for me to get out of the way and it’s time for me to just focus on me,” she said.
n n n
Wild grew up in Riverdale, a small town near Kearney. She was the second of five children.
Her dad ran a grocery store, where she slept on mail bags stacked up in the back and stuffed extra ice cream into the cones she made for friends.
“We have great memories of the store,” she said. “I can still hear it, see it, smell it. It’s that vivid of a memory for me.”
Maybe it was the store, maybe her parents, but her family was close, still are all these years later.
That closeness, she said, has helped her as a school administrator, one charged with solving conflicts that arise between children and families, and school.
“The importance of my family helped me in my position to recognize when a family is upset that what they’re telling me is their family is so important, and they need help.”
But it wasn’t immediately obvious to Wild that education was where she was headed.
She graduated from the University of Nebraska with degrees in economics and sociology. She thought about a career in human resources, but she soon decided that wasn’t the right fit.
She thought about how much she liked kids, how she’d worked in summer programs growing up and decided she wanted to be a school counselor.
She started out teaching at East High School.
“I loved it,” she said. “It was, to me, that rush of helping kids to get from knowing one thing to knowing another.”
She earned a master’s in counseling and then spent the next seven years as a counselor at what was then Lefler Junior High. Another perfect fit.
“Middle school kids are the greatest. They are raw emotion and they’re not afraid to show it,” she said. “They don’t operate with any inhibitions, which is a little bit the way I operate. So it was a good match.”
She earned a doctorate in curriculum and instruction and then went on to be a counselor at Lincoln High, then an associate principal at East for a year. The principal gig, she said, wasn’t the best fit, so when the district office created a new job, she took it.
The new job was a sort of eclectic mix of projects and writing reports and managing paperwork and chairing committees. It grew into a job where Wild helped resolve conflicts between families and the district.
That part of the job evolved because of Wild, Moore said.
“It became clear that her skills, in part because of her training as a counselor but in part just because of the person she is, were so suited to mediating and solving parents’ problems,” Moore said.
In 1995 the director of student services retired and Wild applied.
It was another perfect match.
n n n
When she interviewed for the position, she looked up the definition of service. The dictionary said “to give someone an advantage.”
She got the job and took the definition to heart.
“I think that’s exactly what my job is, to make sure barriers are removed so kids have the advantage of an education.”
Her responsibilities included being in charge of the guidance and counseling program, supervising the social workers, crisis response team and health services, and handling discipline issues, student placement and enrollment, the foreign exchange program, student record maintenance and, most recently, school security.
It meant dealing with angry and frustrated parents, with thorny issues such as discipline and transfers.
She never once dreaded picking up the phone.
“I love dealing with disgruntled families because I love unraveling conflict,” she said.
Sometimes, parents would yell at her over the phone. She’d let them, for a little while, then say “excuse me, I thought you wanted me to help you. Well, I can’t do that if you’re yelling at me.”
And so they’d stop.
She figures two things about her have helped her succeed: An utter lack of fear and the ability never to take anything personally. That and a disarming directness.
Families may not always have been pleased with the resolution, but she said she hopes they understood. She always tried to understand their viewpoint.
“So often the conflict we get into is because we’re not putting ourselves in the family’s skin,” she said. “We are so cautious to follow the rules I think sometimes we forget to think about what it feels like at the moment for them.”
Wild also administers the district’s equity program, investigating complaints filed with the district. Her advocacy role was obvious there, said Christie, the multicultural school/community administrator.
She asked tough questions, sometimes gathering data that suggested schools needed to make their procedures and practices more equitable.
“She raised the consciousness level,” he said.
Concerned about students coming back to school after being incarcerated, she created a transitional program so they could more smoothly ease back into high school.
She thought LPS could do a better job working with expelled students than an outside agency. So it did.
“If you work with Becky, you can’t leave without understanding this is about students,” Christie said. “None of this would exist if it weren’t for students.”
Now, though, Wild will focus on her family, spend time in her home that is painted in warm, rich colors, with her husband, her siblings, her two children, her four grandchildren.
And, as is typical of the woman with BWILD on her license plate, she will fight the disease. She’s determined to beat it. Don’t get her wrong, she knows she’ll die some day. Everybody does.
But it will be on her time. Her terms.
Because that’s the way she lives.
Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com
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MaryAnn wrote on September 7, 2008 11:05 pm: