From Her Perch at the Front Desk, This School Staffer Helps Kids Show Up Each Day

Nancy Muñoz is on her second act — this time, in a school — and she feels she’s finally where she belongs.

After a long career working in health care, the pandemic led her to seek a new opportunity. She found it in the form of an operations coordinator role inside a middle school in Camden, New Jersey.

In that position, Muñoz sits at the front desk — what she calls “the face of the house” — answering phone calls, sending emails, receiving visitors. But the real power of her work, she says, goes well beyond the traditional responsibilities associated with the role.

Muñoz is laser-focused on reducing the school’s chronic absenteeism rate — a challenge that many schools nationwide are grappling with in the wake of the pandemic. She is committed to seeing as many students as possible show up every day, on time, ready to learn. She’s even built her morning coffee routine around it.

In our Role Call series, we feature unsung school staff members — people whose jobs are little-known or misunderstood but who are integral to their school communities. For this installment, we spoke with Muñoz about how her work is about more than answering phone calls and greeting school visitors.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

EdSurge: How did you get here? What brought you to your current role?

Nancy Muñoz: For 16 years, I worked in a hospital setting. The last job that I held was as a cardiac tech. The pandemic hit, and I started scrambling. I had three kids at home that I was homeschooling. I had to scale back my work because I had to stay home with my children. And then the opportunity on Indeed came about. Somebody pitched it. They were like, ‘Hey, try something different.’ My husband was like, ‘Step out on your faith. You’ve been sitting there in health care for so long. Try this. See how you like it.’

They loved me from the time I stepped in the school building all up until today. So I’m like, ‘Wow, what would’ve happened if I would’ve done this earlier in my life?’ It would’ve been a different scenario for me. But the pandemic really shaped me up. I was beat down. I was worn out. Health care was just like … [a lot]. And this was like a breath of fresh air, just to help my community that I still live in to this day. So that’s how I got here.

When people outside of school ask you what you do, how do you describe your work?

Basically how I describe my work and my job is that I am ‘the face of the house.’ When you come to my house, I am the person that answers the door. I’m the person that greets you. I take all your questions, concerns, anything under the umbrella of being like the middleman to my school. I’m at the front desk, fielding messages, answering phone calls, sending emails.

If there’s, for instance, people that come and visit, I take the visitors, I check them in, I make sure that all their credentials are good, then I send them to wherever they need to go.

I stock my workrooms for my staff. I do the busing in the morning. I get the kids on the bus in the afternoon. I do it all.

Because I’m bilingual, if there’s a language barrier, there are certain times where if a staff member can’t communicate with a student that speaks Spanish, they do come and lean on me.

A big, important piece in my work is making sure that we know where our kids are — either we know they’re in the building safe, and if they’re not in the building, what’s going on? Where are you? Why aren’t you here? Can we get you in? Is there anything that we can help you with?

What does a really hard day look like in your role?

A really hard day in my role is when I don’t really know where my kids are — and I call them all my kids because during the day their parents trust me with them. And I say this because I was born and raised here; I grew up with a lot of their parents. So they feel that comfortability.

We haven’t gotten a lot of snow here these past couple years, so now, when they’re calling for a dusting, it’s like the buses run crazy, there’s a two-hour delay. One week we had bitter cold. So it’s like, all right, let me breathe in, because our attendance is not going to be great, and I need to know where my kids are. If they’re not here at 8 a.m., I’m like, OK, what’s my next [move]? So then I just game-plan from there. But that’s a hard day for me — when I don’t see my kids that I see on a regular basis.

What would you do to try and track down the students and get them to school?

Like I said, I normally do busing in the morning. We have about 472 students for the middle school. So I get about a good 73 students off of the bus. There’s always this one kid who misses the bus. So when I call him and his mom, I’m like, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Why are you not here? You know you can’t have a certain amount of absences. What is it that I can help you with?’

I grew up with his mom. I used to work at McDonald’s with her — that’s how far we go back, all the way to high school. Well, they don’t have a car. So I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to come and get you.’ So I would take a break, tell work that I’ll be back in 15 minutes, get in my car, and go pick him up. I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to make this a habit, an everyday thing, but please try to get to your bus stop.’ I said, ‘Use me as a resort, but not every day. I got you, though. I’m going to get you there.’ And that’s just one example.

Is this a school-wide priority because of growing chronic absenteeism nationwide, or is it a personal goal?

On the operations team, our biggest thing is to have a low percentage of chronic absenteeism and to make sure that the kids are prepared to learn, which means showing up on time and being there every day. Now, of course, people get sick. There was a bad case of flu going around in the school. That was the hardest thing, other than the weather — just the fact that all the kids were sick. Even though the pandemic is well over, we don’t want those habits that we had before with, like, ‘Hey, I think my mom is going to be OK with me not coming to school.’ No, you have to go to school.

We have a lot of incentives for the kids — not only with academics, but also there’s quarterly trips that we give to our kids, and the kids know that you can’t be absent more than four days in a quarter in order to get those types of incentives. So we offer a lot, but our main concern every day is to make sure that the kids are in the building, they’re accounted for, and when they’re not in the building, that we also make sure that our absence logs are pristine.

What does a really good day look like in your role?

After having not-so-great attendance with the weather at the beginning of February, we came back the last Monday of the month, and our attendance was 94 percent. When we came in that Tuesday, our attendance was 96.7 percent. So that’s like an average of no more than 15 people out — of the whole entire 472 kids that we have. So that’s a really good day to me: We know that the kids are there.

In the morning, [at home], I have to get my kids together for school, of course, but I’m always just on my Ps and Qs. So I brew Bustelo coffee in the Keurig and blast a message out — a text message — to my whole entire school, and I say, like, ‘Hey, attendance is a top priority at our school, and if you’re not going to be in, please call or text me at my number. Thank you. Have a good day.’

Normally, I get about five to seven people that actually text me and will be like, ‘Hey, we have an appointment. We’ll be there afterwards,’ or, ‘Oh, I took my kid to urgent care yesterday. He’s very sick, has to be fever-free for 24 hours. He’s not going to be back until tomorrow.’ So just that right there, a good day is knowing that I did half the battle before I even got to school, so that when I get to school I can concentrate on the more complex cases of the kids that did not show up.

What does it look like when you get to school and start tackling the remaining absences?

We have three rounds of communication that go out. Our office manager will do the three rounds in an hour. We start pulling attendance at 9 a.m. on the phone. By 9:05, she’s blasting her message. She sends an additional text message because on Dean’s List, [the communication service we use], you can actually make a list just for that day’s absences. So it’ll list all the scholars that have not been [marked as present].

So the office manager will send an email to staffers, we’ll update through staff, then she’ll send out a robocall text message first to the absent list. We’ll get a couple more phone calls, ‘Hey, my kid’s there. Check again.’ Then she’ll send out a voice communication — that’s a standard message that’s already there — and then she’ll send out an email. So we’ll get them three ways within an hour, and then she’ll send the final round of attendance to staff, and that should have our concrete number [of absent students].

What is a way that your role shapes the day for kids?

I’ve been doing busing ever since I started here, and sometimes you just don’t know what the kids are going through. So when they get off the bus and they see me, I’m always happy and I know them by name. Sometimes it’s so impossible in the beginning to know everybody, but I try to learn everybody’s name. I want them to know, like, I want to be personal with you, you bring me joy because you’re here and you want to learn and everything’s going right. If I see that they’re not having a great day when they get off the bus, maybe they’re crying, I’m giving out hugs, telling them, ‘Hey, come talk to me if you need me.’

You never know what the kids go through. These days are different than when we were young. We didn’t have phones. We didn’t have social media. We didn’t have a lot of the things [they are dealing with]. So I always tell them, ‘Hey, if you need me, I’m right here.’

Your role gives you unique access and insight into today’s youth. What’s one thing you’ve learned about young people through your job?

Just try to keep up with them, and always have an open ear. I have kids of my own — ages 19, 11 and 7. It’s important to just be a person that they’re able to communicate with right now. … I want them to know that I listen, and I like TikTok. I love to dance when I can. My knees are bad, but I love to dance. I love to entertain the kids and like I said, just to be an ear. They might not have that at home, so I want them to feel comfortable for them to come talk to me.

That’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned. You can’t always be authoritative all the time. Just listen, hear them out. And then I want them to hear me out as well.