Behind every great school is even better staff. For the past 33 years, students, faculty and parents alike have been greeted by the same smiling face. That smile belongs to Kris Wood. Wood is the financial secretary at Rolla High School and has been since she started at RHS in 1993.
Wood hasn’t always been the financial advisor. When she moved to Rolla in 1988, she was a reporter at the Rolla Daily News.
“ Ironically enough, my first assignment was August 3, 1988 and it was the groundbreaking for this building (the three story section) that we’re in right now,” Wood said.
However, she knew that being at the paper wasn’t something she wanted to do forever. She wanted something different, a family. She had two kids and they both graduated from Rolla with their Mom right there in the front office, Kendra (Class of 2012) and Kameron (Class of 2016). When the position at Rolla opened up, she got an interview.
“When I first started, I didn’t know what a purchase order was. I mean, he asked me during my interview, ‘can you do a purchase order?’ I looked at him, and I said, “I don’t know what a purchase order is, but I’ll learn.”
She definitely sells herself short with “learning” – she excelled. So much so that she is still here 33 years later and now works alongside her former students.
“When I started here, Miss Mesa and Dr Grisham were sophomores, and now Jamie and I do everything together. We vacation together.”
When asked about her most impactful moment at RHS in her 33 years here, the response was an unexpected one. Her eyes went teary and she seemed to travel back in time. She took a breath and revealed her most impactful moment was when Carin Allen (the then Latin teacher at RHS) and her husband Phillip Allen were killed in a car accident in Sedalia Missouri.
“She and her husband were both killed on impact, and we were good friends, but both of kids survived. They moved to Texas and graduated there,” Wood said.
The room felt the sudden shift in emotion. It was clear that this event was big and touched a lot of people. Some of the staff remembered hearing about the wreck, but were too young to really feel its effects. Sometimes the most impactful moments are the ones people don’t like to talk about.
Once the eyes in the room had dried, the focus shifted to someone else. This someone is Kris Wood’s actual “Rolla Bulldog” Ellie.
“Last year, in August, it was 15 minutes before the bell rang. I looked outside, and I saw a delivery truck going the wrong way in the parent pickup line. He came in, and he said, ‘I’ve got a delivery’ and it was for the drama department. I didn’t have a custodian available, and he’s blocking all the traffic. So he said, Will you hold the door open for me? And I said, Sure. So I go out and I’m holding the door, and a lady walks across the parking lot and lays that six pound English bulldog puppy on my chest and said, she is free to a good home, would you help me? I looked down, and I immediately said, Yes. I don’t know what happened to the delivery driver,” Wood said.
Wood is planning to retire after this year. Staff and students are already starting to feel the gap that will be left in her presence, one teacher even jokingly saying, “before you leave and the world falls apart…”. Wood is confident that RHS will find a replacement for her, but there is a lot of skepticism around that claim. She is simply irreplaceable. Even though she will be gone, she won’t be far. That’s just who she is.
“I’m a phone call away,” Wood said.
