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Numbers Game

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Numbers Game
Features
Area Colleges Are Applying Imagination to Enrollment- building Efforts
Numbers Game

AIC’s Peter Miller says that colleges need to be more sophisticated than ever to reach enrollment targets.

American International College is targeting young people in China, as well as individuals who simply can’t find a seat at a four-year school in California. Meanwhile, UMass Amherst is putting added focus on out-of-state students. These are just some of the strategies being applied as area colleges seek to bolster their enrollment numbers, which have been steadily rising over the past several years.

This is the season that high-school seniors have been waiting for all year. Upcoming graduation? Guess again.

By May 1, all students expecting to go on to college this fall will need to make their decisions regarding where they will go. It’s called Candidates’ Reply Date, and for the admissions departments at area four-year colleges, this time of year is critical.

The word from local colleges is that application numbers are strong for the incoming freshman class of 2010, mirroring a trend in place for the last several years.

It has been widely reported that, during the first months of the recession, students were returning to school in record numbers. But that trend toward higher application numbers, and resulting higher enrollment sizes, are the only constants in the admissions process. In Western Mass., colleges saw their class sizes swell, but in many cases the competition for those students has led to substantive changes in the admissions process.

At American International College, Vice President for Admission Services Peter Miller said that the school is far more sophisticated than ever before in how it does its job. From national and international outreach all the way to use of social media, the role of admissions is more important than ever to secure those target numbers. Some schools go to great lengths in their use of contemporary technology, but Miller only half-jokingly said, “if I ever text-message for a prospective student, I’ve told my colleagues to shoot me!”

The numbers game for student population has changed the admissions techniques, but it also has led some schools to focus on their brand image — the goods and services that can be sold to high-school prospects.

In these highly competitive times, improved campus amenities make a big difference, said Mary DeAngelo, interim director of Enrollment Management at Springfield College. “We have recently opened two new facilities that help in making the college appealing to prospective students. We have a brand-new campus union that just opened in January. Students are thrilled with it. Last fall, 2008, we opened a new recreation and wellness facility, which is second to none.”

UMass Amherst Chancellor Robert Holub has publicly stated his goals for gradual growth of the student body to better represent the school’s status as a state flagship university. His goal has a focus on attracting out-of-state students, whose tuition money stays on campus, rather than state students’ payments, which are filtered into the state revenue stream.

There has been wide support of his initiative, but voices on campus have publicly criticized the cost of attracting such a population, and the means to make it happen. The numbers game of student enrollment has reached a critical stage for colleges attempting to keep up with years of record student populations, but some ask, when is not enough too much?

Digital Readout

DeAngelo said that the school year beginning in fall 2009 has been “very interesting.”

“I think you’ll hear that from just about any private school,” she continued. “And it was because of the economy. We were very uncertain how enrollment would turn out, even though application numbers were good, and interest was high. But families were really anxious. When they are sitting at the kitchen table on April 27, they had to ask themselves, ‘can we afford a private college?’”

Others echoed that sentiment. While the recession caused many families to take a sober look at their expenses for higher education, 2009 was a great year for the state’s flagship Amherst campus. “We set a record last year, and the year before,” said Ed Blaguszewski, director of the school’s News and Information Office.

“We have been at over 30,000 applications for the last three years for incoming freshman,” he continued, “and we believe that continues to indicate a very strong interest in the value of a UMass education, at an affordable price.”

Kathleen Wrobleski, director of Communications and Marketing at Bay Path College, called the economic downturn “a double-edged sword.” While students and families grapple with the cost of a college education, when times are tough, people historically head back to school.

With finances as a potential pitfall to prospective students, she said that is one area where Bay Path stands out. “We recognized early on that people shouldn’t have finances as a barrier to going to college. We’ve made institutional changes to make that happen. For the undergraduate program, and the Saturday program, there are more scholarships. We have a very aggressive program.”

She said that Bay Path’s method of admissions is different than most, with undergraduate, one-day, and graduate programs accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year. Every October, however, a snapshot of all three populations is offered for statistical analysis. From that perspective, Wrobleski said that Bay Path’s enrollment was at 2,000, the highest in the college’s history.

Tools of the Trade

By the time President Obama made a pledge last year that the U.S. will “have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world,” the numbers across the nation were already steadily edging toward that goal.

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that, over the past 10 years, the percentage of students who go on to college within 12 months of high-school graduation has increased significantly. In 2007, that number was at 67% of the nation’s youth. Competition for those best and brightest is at an all-time peak as well, college officials say.

According to Wrobleski, Bay Path has something unique to offer as a means of driving students to their campus. “We develop programs that are very career-focused, and very responsive to the job market.”

Elaborating, she said, in its graduate program, Bay Path “has an MBA in entrepreneurial thinking and innovative practices, the only one of its kind in the area. And then we have an MS in nonprofit management. These are closely linked to many of the job opportunities in this region.”

DeAngelo said that her job is essentially the top of a pyramid that extends over the campus, with recruiting new students seen as “everyone’s job.”

“And that comes from the top down,” she continued, “which it needs to, in order to be successful. Dr. Richard Flynn has been president for 11 years, and from his first day on this campus, every time he has a chance to speak to all members of the college community at one location, he says that recruiting students is everyone’s job. What that means is we enjoy great support from the faculty, other administrators, coaches — who are a great recruiting force for us — from students, and phenomenal support from our alumni base.”

At AIC, Miller agreed that recruitment is a campus-wide endeavor. He, too, credits the school’s current administration as influential. “As our first new president in many, many years, Vincent Maniaci came in with a lot of enthusiasm and vision, and he wanted to move AIC forward.”

What that has translated into is expansion of several programs and departments at the school, both locally and far afield. New departments and majors have been coupled with an increase in athletics, and the coaching staff has been given full-time status in order to take more than one for the team.

“If we want to get to the number that we want to each year,” Miller explained, “we know that we need to rely on the football coach to recruit 75 students. We set goals for each coach, but we’ve added new teams. There’s been enormous success with a new track and field team in attracting students.”

As full-time faculty, the coaching staff operates on several levels. In addition to their ability to recruit, they are also often closely linked to the students’ performance at school. Miller said that this is an enormous aid in student retention from year to year.

“Those numbers, from freshman year on through graduation, have been improved,” he said, “by about 7% between the last years, and by 5% between the years prior.”

Go East, Young Man

Miller had just returned from a recruiting trip to China, which he said was the college’s newest focus for out-of-state students.

Parallel to the college’s accreditation process a few years back, something revisited every 10 years, was a period of self-study for the vision of AIC.

“We decided that we wanted to be more global in what we were doing,” he said. “We’ve created some pretty significant goals in internationalizing the campus, both for our current students and integrating into the classroom what international students can bring to the campus. China is a country that we’ve targeted, one obvious reason being the millions upon millions there. We wanted to be a player in that, so we set up a recruiting center there.”

And prior to setting their sights overseas, AIC had established a presence in the beleaguered California state college system.

While the Commonwealth has had its share of budget woes in the last couple of years, the California Department of Education has been faced with nothing short of a crisis: too many students, not enough vacancies, and, most importantly, not enough money. At the end of February, Jack Scott, chancellor of that state’s community colleges, said 200,000 students would be unable to return to campus this fall because there simply isn’t any space for them.

Miller said that, because access to a four-year degree for those community-college students has been made so difficult, he and Maniaci spent a week building a beachhead for students to come to AIC.

“How are we going to make ourselves attractive?” he asked. “Well, initially, we decided that we were going to offer a $10,000 scholarship to those students, anyone graduating from a community college in California. As a marketing tool, that really grabs you.

“But,” he continued, “we can’t just drop in once a year and expect that we’re going to win people over. We need an ongoing presence on those campuses. We heard that from all the schools. So we’ve hired a transfer counselor to eventually be full-time out there.”

State of Affairs

The Bay State’s budget woes are nothing to sniff at, either.

Between 2008 and 2010, Beacon Hill slashed 37% in state support for higher education, the largest percentage reduction in the country. As one means to address that, Blaguszewski said, “the state legislature has provided us an incentive over the last five or more years to work effectively in recruiting out-of-state students.

“We want to maintain access for students in Massachusetts,” he continued, “and we’re not diminishing that. But the extra spaces we’re creating are targeted at out-of-state students. Not only will that add to the dynamic aspect on campus, but it will be a revenue generator. We get to keep out-of-state tuition on this campus, whereas state tuition goes back to the state coffers.”

In a recent essay printed in the New York Times, Professor Nancy Folbre of UMass Amherst’s Economics Department likened the measure to students as “the new cash cows.”

She said the intensified marketing campaign aimed at out-of-state students is a well-meaning strategy that could backfire for several reasons.

“Administrators can feel pressure to invest in new facilities that look good on the glossy brochures … rather than improving student advising or course availability,” she wrote, and “if more students are added without increasing the number of faculty and staff, students get less individual attention and can’t get into the courses they need to graduate.

“The percentage of students taught by full-time, tenure-track faculty members per student at state universities has steadily declined in recent years,” she added.

A new plan to increase out-of-state expansion involves rewarding individual departments more adept at recruiting outside the state line, she noted. Given Massachusetts’ striking distance to the Empire State, Folbre humorously noted that a colleague “has offered to publicly renounce the Red Sox in favor of the Yankees.”

At AIC, Miller said that, in his 35 years in college admissions, the industry might have evolved, but some things will always stay the same. “What will never change, as long as I’m in this role, is the notion of relationship marketing.”

Technology, technique, and sometimes tactics might all be keeping pace with competition, but, he added, “there’s a fine balance in implementing all the things necessary for moving a student a certain way without losing sight of that student as a person.”

Sound Business Strategy

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Sound Business Strategy
Features
Valley Communications Remains Focused on the Big Picture
Sound Business Strategy

Jim Tremble (right, with Bob Tremble, left, and Pat Parente) says Valley’s 65 years in the industry gives it a competitive advantage.

Jim Tremble can tell you that the old adage, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ easily applies to his business.

As president of Valley Communications Systems Inc., he is one of six second-generation Trembles to carry on the company started by his parents in 1945. What began as a small retail photo shop has grown to become one of the pioneering distributors of communications equipment and services in New England.

The business has stayed in the same location in Chicopee, just off I-291, for the past few decades, yet from that same location new products and services have been added to the Valley roster almost as soon as they’ve become available.

Tremble said that, because of the company’s reputation, with 65 years in the industry, when manufacturers have something new to offer, it’s usually Valley who gets first crack at it. “Being in business as long as we have gives us an advantage,” he said. “And we have developed a relationship in each of our disciplines. We’ve represented the top manufacturers of each of them at one time or another. When a manufacturer has a new product and wants representation in the New England area, they come to us first. This isn’t bragging; it’s a fact.”

While Tremble could easily brag about the strength of the family business, he joined his brother Bob — who, along with brother Mike, heads the video, A/V, and data/imaging department — to describe how the company that began with a spirited young couple became the successful enterprise it is today.

Mother Knows Best

When Rita and Ed Tremble first hung out their shingle on State Street in Springfield, the pair sold photographic equipment. Ed ran the front of the house, while Rita took care of both the bookkeeping and the nuts and bolts of the business. Jim and Bob credit her vision for the company that Valley Communications has become today.

“She was the instrument of change,” Bob said. “She recognized technology and decided that it was something that we wanted to be a part of almost immediately. She called in manufacturers, and, lo and behold, we were suddenly part of the security business, or the telephone business.” Looking back, that foresight is nothing short of spectacular.

Within four years, a new branch opened on Belmont Avenue in Springfield. From there, Jim counted off the services that his parents added to their portfolio, essentially adding up a roster of the history of the 20th century’s communications industry.

First branching out as a holding facility for New England Telephone’s 16mm films for elementary classrooms, the pair segued into intercom systems for those schools. When Valley decided to add commercial sound systems to their roster in the late 1940s, it became the go-to resource for professional installation. The Eastern States Exposition’s Coliseum was outfitted by the Trembles, and later, they worked on both Springfield and Hartford’s Civic Centers. Jim estimates that 80% to 90% of all churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut have had Valley Communications install their sound systems.

When Rita decided to add security to her portfolio, the company installed residential and commercial cameras and touch-tone entry pads. Within 10 years, the focus shifted to larger applications. “And we’ve been doing that for the last 40 years,” Jim noted.

A landmark FCC deregulation decision in the late ’60s, known as the Carterfone Act, allowed non-AT&T phones to connect to that company’s communications grid. Jim said that this legislation was immediately embraced by Valley. “Because we were already doing work over lines like intercoms and such, it was a natural for us to get into that.”

The company’s history tells of the challenges they faced in those early days taking on Ma Bell head to head. Valley contended with what it calls “mysterious” accidents, cut wires and cables, uncooperative operators, and many court cases, all without hindering its role as David to AT&T’s Goliath. From that contentious beginning, according to company records, Valley “is nationally recognized as one of the largest independent telephone interconnects in the communications industry.”

Currently, the largest account for Valley is the Mass. State Lottery Commission. “If you’re familiar with Keno,” Jim said, “Valley installs at least one monitor in connection to the data computer in every restaurant, bar, and grocery store that sells and plays Keno. The new Daily Race Game, started about a year ago, is now an offshoot of that.”

The beginnings of the company might be humble, but the current business, with more than $25 million in annual sales, is anything but. Jim is happy to mention that, of the 106 employees, many have been with Valley for decades.

Securing Success

Keeping abreast of technology in the highly competitive and constantly evolving field of communications can be a daunting challenge. But Jim said that Valley confidently keeps appraised of the latest and greatest, and described his simple yet secure methods.

“We learn from what we see and read, and we keep up with the industry forecasters — looking three to five years down the road,” he explained. “We listen to the manufacturers that we align ourselves with. They are developing new products, and that affects them more than us. We get it from our salespeople; they are out there seeing what people want and need. We get it from our competitors. Sometimes that’s your best clue to what’s going on. If someone gets the jump on you, well, you’re going to find out what that is.

“Those four key methods keep us tapped into the vein,” he said.

Responding to comments about the economic conditions of the past year, Bob proudly stated that “the business part of it, from 1945 to now, can be summed up as easily as this — every single year we’ve made a profit. While some years might have been better than others, that has always been the case.”

This past year’s performance was helped by solidification and expansion of a new division for the company, one focused on business security, something Valley has always done, but, until recently, on a relatively small scale.

“About six months ago we decided to start a separate department to forge that division forward,” said Bob Tremble. “So in October of this past year, the division took off, and already we’ve had about $1 million in sales.”

In addition to security at the former federal building at 1550 Main St. in Springfield, Valley is handling security systems at a county jail outside Boston, all of the WNEC campus, “and just this morning,” Bob added, “we got a job for a high school in Connecticut.”

Jim explained how the new security division is an example of ongoing expansion and diversification, a trademark for his business. “Instead of saying, ‘how can we cut back?’ and ‘where do we have to cut jobs?’ we’ve said, ‘how do we increase the number of jobs, and increase our income?’”

Bob agreed, adding that “we knew there was a lot of business out there; what we needed to do was to position ourselves, with the proper people, talent, and resources, to go out there and get that business. And it is working.”

Back to School

Another important product category for the company, one that’s really exploded over the past 10 years, is the SMART classroom, Bob explained, using the brand name for what is known in the industry as interactive white boards. Chalkboards are destined to become another academic relic of earlier centuries.

The product looks like a white, dry-erase panel about six feet square, with a data projector mounted above. That white surface promises to be one of Valley’s next great contributions to its clients.

“There are about 53,000 classrooms K through 12 in Massachusetts, and about 32,000 in Connecticut,” said Bob. “We have put smart classrooms in about 20% of them, so we look at about 80% to go. That’s a lot of boards.

“When we started to put these into the classrooms,” he continued, “we thought, ‘what a great product.’ The teachers can link their computer up to it, and the board itself is touch-sensitive — you can write on it with your finger.”

While the newer crop of tech-savvy teachers might be as familiar with computers as their students, earlier generations found the tools foreign, Bob said. “About three or four years into our putting these boards in, we went back to the schools to see how the teachers were using them. We thought it would be a good exercise. We found out that, in many cases, the boards were used simply as a white chalkboard, or a projection screen — not the purpose for them. It was an awakening for us.”

In true entrepreneurial fashion, a need was identified, and a solution quickly addressed. A training program for the SMART boards was established, with courses offered in all the disciplines and educational levels that would be working with the equipment. The training became a division known as Valley Academy. Those same teachers who relied on their older lesson plans, perhaps resistant to this newfangled device, discovered how it could improve their lessons and better involve tech-oriented students.

Because of the success of both Valley Academy and those teachers spreading the word out in the field, Bob said that there was an explosion of additional sales. Parochial schools in the Boston area have been programming a set number of boards to be installed in their schools every year until all classrooms are outfitted, and new construction often designates them. Smiling, Bob said his goal is to see those other 80% of classrooms with SMART boards.

Local Heroes

While Valley may have a geographic market all over New England, both Trembles emphasized that this company is, and will always be, a local business.

“We’re a private institution, not a worldwide entity,” Jim said. “We know that New England is our territory, and we want to do the best possible job that we can in that area. In my lifetime, I don’t want to be a national company. I eat and sleep in the area that I sell my products. I run into the people that I do business with, and I want to continue to be proud of what I’ve done for them.”

For Valley, he stressed, the relationship with the client begins after the product or service is sold. “It doesn’t take much magic to sell something,” Jim said. “Anyone can do that; you lower your price and get it out there. It does, however, take something to carry on after the sale.”

Looking ahead, the third generation of Trembles is busy on the front lines, just like the generation before them. Both men have sons that work for Valley, both in the Chicopee facility and out in the field. While Ed passed away some time ago, Rita, at age 93, still comes in once a week to check up on her children. They laughed when the subject of succession to the next generation came up.

“It’s a little early to tell what will happen,” Jim said. “But there are 48 grandchildren, so there’s a lot of good talent to pick from.”

One thing is certain: the field of communications will be changing. But when Valley says that it too has evolved apace with technology, there’s 65 years of proof to the statement. The Trembles’ method of business might be old-fashioned in a rapidly changing world, but Jim summed up how it’s a success.

“The same customer that bought a system from us in 1950 is still doing business with us today,” he said. “That, to me, is the key that keeps my blood running. It’s a great comfort that these people let us continue to do business the way we were taught to do it back in 1945.”

A Truly Inspirational Story

By
Chad Mullin
Sections Supplements
How Mary Lane’s Chad Mullin Went from Spinning News to Making It
Chad Mullin

Chad Mullin says he long desired his current job, and prepared for the day when he would compete for it.

When Charles (Chad) Mullin was manager of public relations and marketing for Baystate Mary Lane Hospital in Ware, he would often “hang out” (his words) in departments such as radiology, cardiology, the lab, the sleep program, and others.

“I was the ‘PR guy who just wouldn’t leave them alone,’” said Mullin, adding that he was fascinated with the new technologies and procedures put to use in those departments.

Outwardly, he was looking for story angles for the internal publications for which he would write and edit, and also for ways to generate external press for the small, 31-bed hospital he joined in 1997.

But there was much more going on.

He was watching, learning, and appreciating the work being done, while also setting an ambitious career goal — to one day be the one leading those departments in the position known as director of Diagnostic Services.

The position was occupied when he set that goal, of course, but he knew that someday it would be available. And he went about making himself job-ready — by taking the knowledge he had amassed and coupling it with an MBA he earned from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst in the spring of 2008.

The day before commencement, his father passed away unexpectedly.

“I still walked down the aisle to get my diploma,” said Mullin, adding that he did so more out of respect for his father than anything else. And a few months later, when the director of Diagnostic Services position did in fact come open, he showed that respect again.

“My father was always saying that, if you want something in life, just do it,” said Mullin. “When I went back to school, I just wanted to get my education and to get this job.”

And roughly a year ago, he was given the title he long coveted. The work, as he expected, is challenging and rewarding, and he enjoys just about everything about it.

In this issue, BusinessWest looks at how Mullen made the unusual leap from PR to hospital administration, and how he’s settled into this important role.

Hot Off the Press

Not long after he arrived at Baystate Mary Lane, Mullin concluded that, despite its small size, this was a hospital he wanted to stay with — although not necessarily in that position.

“For me, it’s the people, and the fact that you’re involved in a lot of decision-making,” said Mullin, adding that, soon after arriving, he got a real feel for the sense of what he called “family” that exists at the hospital. “Patients know employees, mothers bring their daughters, and eventually those daughters bring their daughters; there’s a real community connection here.”

Mullin got to know every corner, every aspect of the hospital in his role as manager of public relations and marketing, a job he ascended to after serving for two years as a public-relations assistant at Baystate Medical Center. He actually started as an intern at Baystate, worked briefly in public relations for the Big E, and then returned to the medical center.

At Mary Lane, Mullin was responsible for public-relations functions; internal employee, management, and medical staff communication; and marketing activities. He also coordinated special events. In the course of doing all that, he developed a keen understanding of how the hospital and its various departments, especially the diagnostic areas, worked — and how they could work more efficiently.

All this contributed to Mullin’s goal of someday leading the diagnostics department, a progression he admitted was somewhat unusual, and perhaps only doable at a smaller hospital like Mary Lane.

When now-former Diagnostics Director Bill Patten announced his plans to leave for another opportunity in the summer of ’08, Mullin had a lengthy talk with Mary Lane President and CEO Christine Shirtcliff about the position and his desire to hold it. Actually, he said he had spoken to her often about his desire to be in hospital administration at some point.

What he told her — and BusinessWest — is that, while he lacked direct experience in administration, he had a thorough understanding of the hospital, its component parts, and how to remain competitive in the local health care market.

“I think the 12 years of working here prior to seeking this role helped prepare me for it,” he explained, “because when you work in a small community hospital, you have exposure to a lot of clinical and non-clinical work. I had a good understanding of the operations arena.”

This level of understanding was obviously communicated to those interviewing candidates, and the message resonated with them.

As director of Diagnostic Services, Mullin supervises roughly 65 employees working in several different departments. They include Diagnostic Radiology, Mammography, Nuclear Medicine, Ultrasound, CT, Cardiology, Laboratory, the Sleep Program, Respiratory, and Outpatient Specialty Services.

He knows all the numbers — 29,000 radiology exams a year, 165,000 lab tests, and 280 sleep studies — but, more importantly, he knows the people behind the numbers

There was still a learning curve for Mullin, but he said he had — and still has — a good support network to help him in what is still a career in transition.

“I knew going into the position that I wasn’t going to be out there on an island,” he explained. “That’s because Mary Lane is so integrated with Baystate Health that I knew I had people in Springfield — in radiology, in laboratory, and in the sleep program — that I could call at a moment’s notice to help me through any challenges that came up.”

He describes his work as purely administrative, with the clinical link being the supervisors, or the “wheels on the ground,” as he called them, running each specific department. “They’re the ones managing most of the day-to-day clinical issues.”

When asked about what a day in his new life is like, Mullin said this is much more of a 24/7 position than his previous work; now, as then, he carries a beeper. There are more meetings, obviously, both within the Mary Lane operation, and the Baystate system. Mullin appreciates the latter, because there is a sharing of ideas that can benefit his facility and all others under the Baystate umbrella.

“You can share information about what works at your place, and they share information about what works at theirs,” he explained. “We’re always refining the way we deliver services here at Mary Lane.”

And Mullin says the learning process never ends.

“I’m still learning every day,” he said. “There are many facets to this position, and there is a lot involved with each of those patient-care areas. You’ll learn different ways of doing your job and how you can help your techs do their job every day.”

The Bottom Line

When asked if he had to write the press release for his own promotion a year ago, Mullin laughed and said that responsibility fell elsewhere.

Clearly, he already had new responsibilities and a new job to learn and do.

His father had told him that, if he wanted something in life, then he should just do it. This was something he wanted, and he did it.

George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]

What’s Your Function?

By
Loren Isler-Wallander
Sections Supplements
What’s Your Function?
Loren Isler-Wallander

Loren Isler-Wallander uses an ultrasound device that employs heat to promote healing, one of the many modalities available to today’s physical therapists.

Cathleen Bastible remembers the day several athletes from a local college wound up in Noble Hospital after practicing too long in the heat, and the day a local police academy made the same mistake. And, for that matter, the time she stood in the vault of a local bank, showing its employees how to properly carry heavy bags of coins.

In her 14 years with Noble Hospital Sports and Rehabilitation Center, Bastible, the center’s executive director, has seen a wide range of injuries stemming not just from sports, but the hidden hazards of daily life — hidden, that is, until patients are made aware of their lifestyle mistakes.

“We’ve seen an uptick in tendinitis due to the setup of people’s computer workstations, things like that,” she said. “We do a fair amount of education. Some people lift for a living, and we teach them about body mechanics. Or their chairs aren’t adjusted properly. There are so many daily tasks we’re doing wrong. And we’re passing it on to our kids — they’re using computers four times as much as we are. We could be raising a generation of people with wrist and arm problems, and I’m convinced we’ll all be deaf from wearing iPods.”

The educational component is critical for everyone who comes through the door, said Bastible, whether it’s giving a pregnant woman exercises to help her manage back pain or showing athletes how to stay injury-free. It’s no coincidence that most sports-related visits occur early in the season, when players aren’t always properly conditioned. “We work with coaches on drills that help stave off problems.”

“Neck and back injuries are the most common,” said Keith Riedy, one of Noble’s physical therapists, “but we also see a lot of joint replacements; knee, hip, and shoulder problems; tennis elbow; hand and wrist injuries; and we’re the only clinic in Westfield that has an occupational therapist.”

True to its name, the center handles its share of sports injuries, including athletes from Westfield State College and the city’s public schools. But its services are far more extensive, encompassing gait deficits, or problems with walking, as well as balance issues, general weakness, recovery from strokes and amputations, Parkinson’s disease, and wheelchair evaluations, just to name a few.

“Let’s say you hurt your back,” he said. “You’d have a comprehensive evaluation to determine whether you’d benefit from pain modalities, electrical stimulation, heat and ice, etc. The general focus is on flexibility, strength, and function, and our goal is to get you back to your previous level of function as soon as possible and resolve your pain. Typically, people are here 10 to 12 visits — two or three times a week, depending on the severity of the injury.”

Riedy has been in the field 23 years and has seen technology advance, but he takes an old-fashioned approach when describing the core of physical therapy. “These are still the best tools,” he said, holding up both hands.

For this issue, BusinessWest visits the rehabilitation center, located in downtown Westfield, for a look at how those hands — and generous doses of common sense — are helping patients reduce their pain and get back to daily life.

Bringing It Home

Loren Isler-Wallander, a physical therapist at the center, said the field has seen some dramatic changes over the years. “It was underutilized, and there was a time when maybe it was overutilized, but I think the relationship between physicians and physical therapists is growing, and they’re beginning to understand how they can work with us.”

What that creates is a structured continuum of care between Noble Hospital, individual physicians, and outpatient rehab, he explained. And some of those patients are being referred with serious issues that have to be resolved faster than ever because insurers are paying for fewer sessions than in the past.

That, again, is where the education component comes in; although a patient might go in for rehab twice a week, he’s given exercises and activities to incorporate throughout the week, and needs to be responsible for his own care, both during the rehab period and after.

“It’s no longer a passive experience,” said Isler-Wallander. “It’s a much more collaborative partnership. I give people a lot of homework. If they’re here two days a week, those other five days they’re on their own, so they’d better be doing something.”

That said, the staff at Noble Hospital Sports and Rehabilitation Center want patient visits to be as cheerful as possible, and the design of the center, open and well-lit, reflects the upbeat attitudes of the staff, said Riedy, most of whom have been with Noble for 15 years or more. “We try to keep it animated and light,” he told BusinessWest. “When people come in here, they’re in pain; we don’t treat just the pain, but the whole person. And laughter can be the best medicine.”

Luis Amaral finds the environment infectious, too. In a practice boasting several veterans in the field with 20-plus years of experience, he’s is a relative newcomer, joining the center in 2002.

“It’s been my experience with people I’ve worked with that most of us got into it because we had something wrong and had to go to physical therapy ourselves,” Amaral said. “With me, I happened to injure my knee.”

After a few doctor visits had him in an immobilizing cast, he decided to give physical therapy a shot. “They gave me some exercises and some treatment, and within a few weeks, I felt much better. I thought, maybe there’s something to this stuff.”

So much so that Amaral began looking at it as a career. He originally intended to be a physical therapist assistant, but went on to earn his master’s degree and become a full-fledged PT. Since then, physical therapists have required doctorate-level education; current PTs are grandfathered in, but Amaral went back to school to earn his doctorate anyway.

“Basically, they’re trying to get you better faster,” he said of the additional education necessary today. “Over the past few years, the profession has become heavily into evidence-based practices, and a big part of that is being able to design and review research and studies and apply that to your practice.”

Isler-Wallander agreed that rehabilitation has become a much more holistic practice as the profession has moved away from what he called a “seat-of-the-pants” approach and toward scientifically based treatments that consider the whole person.

“Physical therapy has changed its focus from just going through exercises to focusing on people’s function and how they can get back to their daily lives,” he explained. “What’s important to them, and how can we get them back to that? It’s not just treating the wrist; can they pick up a coffee cup? It’s not just reducing pain in the knee; do they like to garden? Then let’s get them back to gardening. So not only is there a more scientific basis for what we do, but we work with referral doctors as a team to focus on these functional outcomes.”

The reward, of course, comes when a patient has a breakthrough that leads to that restored function and quality of life.

“I love seeing people get better,” said Riedy. “Not everyone gets better, of course, but if we treat 10 people and one or two get better, they make it all worthwhile. There are people who never thought they’d walk again, and they’re walking. With other people, we just want to make them more functional within their pain tolerance, and get them back doing some of the things they like, returning to work, sports, and leisure activities.”

Even with the additional education necessary to enter the field these days, physical therapy and rehabilitation remains a hot career choice because the need is only expected to grow as Baby Boomers get older, Bastible said.

“They’re expected to live longer and stay more active” than previous generations, she said. “They don’t want to slow down; they don’t see themselves that way.”

And why should they, these therapists say, when so many tools — starting with those hands Riedy talked about — are available to them?

“The best thing is when someone who hasn’t been able to get resolution somewhere else comes here, and you help them get better,” Amaral said. “This may sound selfish, but it makes you feel good to be able to do that, to hear someone say, ‘I don’t want to live like this,’ and then at least see them able to carry on with their lives. It’s a good feeling.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at

[email protected]

Watching…and Collecting

By
Allison Ebner says high-level candidates are tough to find, even when hiring is slow.
Sections Supplements

Jobless Benefits Are Keeping Many Laid-off Workers on the Sidelines

Allison Ebner says high-level candidates are tough to find, even when hiring is slow.

Allison Ebner says high-level candidates are tough to find, even when hiring is slow.

With layoffs in Massachusetts soaring to levels not seen in almost 20 years, one might expect employment agencies to see a huge influx of job seekers for the limited number of openings that are available. But that has not been the case across the Pioneer Valley. Sure, the available talent pool is larger than before, but not significantly so, as many laid-off individuals are apparently taking advantage of government-extended unemployment benefits and waiting out the storm.

In a time of economic freefall, it seems people appreciate a good safety net.

As the job market has soured nationally, Massachusetts has seen its unemployment rate soar from 4.3% in April 2008 — and just 5.4% as recently as October — to 8.2% this past March. Typically, a trend like that translates to a rush of new applications at employment agencies, as the ranks of the newly laid-off scramble for available work opportunities. But in that regard, this recession has been somewhat different than others.

“We’ve seen recruiting become easier for sure,” said Andrea Hill-Cataldo, president of Johnson & Hill Staffing Services in Springfield — but only to a point. “It’s definitely easier to find skilled people, but typically in a recession like this we would be inundated with people. We’d be so busy, we’d have to turn people away.”

Simply put, the current recession isn’t bringing that huge influx typical of past downturns Hill-Cataldo has witnessed. Part of that, she told BusinessWest, might be the larger safety net being set out for jobless Americans.

“I’m thinking that part of it is that unemployment benefits have been extended so much, and the government is backing COBRA,” she said, referring to the program that allows people to hang onto their health insurance after leaving a job. “Meanwhile, people are hearing so much bad news that they’re kind of opting out of searches for awhile. They’re just not looking.”

Most of those hunkering down seem to be individuals who have worked and advanced steadily in their careers for some time and have a reasonably strong skill set — exactly the sort of applicant an agency wants to see in its talent pool.

“It’s a really interesting market,” said Allison Ebner, executive vice president of United Personnel in Springfield. “We have not seen a huge influx of high-level candidates or really solid workers who are looking to make a change because of layoffs. Those people seem to be staying at home.”

The story changes for lower-paying positions requiring more basic skills, she noted. “We’re able to find those folks out there.”

The extended benefits won’t last forever, of course, and no one knows how the behavior of job seekers will change as the recession drags on. But for now, the number of Western Mass. residents taking a deliberate break from punching the time clock is on the rise.

Helping Hand

One of the ongoing economic stories in Western Mass. is that of a persistent gap between the skill level of job seekers and the demands of potential employers. And by most accounts, it hasn’t narrowed appreciatively for area agencies.

“Certainly there’s still a recruiting challenge, and there still is a skills gap,” said Hill-Cataldo, particularly in typically hard-to-fill areas such as legal and administrative. That challenge isn’t helped when promising individuals stop looking for work, instead filing for unemployment pay.

Indeed, the federal government has actively intervened in extending unemployment benefits across the nation. In two separate extensions, one last July and another in November, Massachusetts has seen the benefit ceiling raised from 26 weeks to 46. (Typically the state limit is 30 weeks, but that base period drops to 26 weeks when federal extensions come into play.)

However, the incentive to stop looking for work can vary with one’s previous income level. That’s because, while unemployment pay in Massachusetts covers around 50% of someone’s previous salary, it maxes out at $628 per week.

So, while someone in a lower pay bracket might see their income halved if they don’t find new work, an individual who brought in, say, $1,200 a week before being laid off might be reluctant to take a lower-paying job when they could collect almost as much by staying at home.

At the same time, however, someone laid off from an especially high-paying position isn’t likely to find much relief in even the full unemployment benefit. These factors, and how they affect each family differently, has made it tough for employment agencies to predict when, and in what fields, they’ll see an influx of new job seekers.

In addition, as Hill-Cataldo noted, the federal stimulus package passed by Congress in February includes a subsidy that covers 65% of the COBRA premium, for up to nine months, for laid-off workers who use the program to maintain their group health insurance.

COBRA is a lifeline for millions of Americans, particularly at a time of soaring job losses, but it’s also expensive; typically, workers must pay the entire premium, plus a 2% administrative fee, when before their employer picked up most of the tab. The average family’s cost of COBRA coverage is around $1,100 per month, which is being reduced to less than $400 with the 65% benefit — further persuading many individuals to ride out the economic storm using unemployment benefits, rather than looking for a new job.

With people able, in many cases, to pocket from the government a sizable portion of their paycheck while retaining health coverage, said Ebner, many are choosing to do so — in some cases taking advantage of worker-training resources or going back to school, but in others simply taking an extended vacation from working. The benefits, in other words, provide a much more emphatic reason than usual to pass up jobs at lesser pay rates than they’re used to.

“A common assumption is that folks out there are willing to take less money for more work, but we have not seen that to be true,” said Ebner. “People who made $20 an hour and are now willing to work for $14 — those people are not there.

“It’s a case where unemployment benefits have been extended, and Washington is giving people longer to collect,” she continued. “Right now, the career centers are flooded with people filing for unemployment; they’re swamped. But the employment agencies, the temporary help services, they’re not seeing an influx of highly qualified people.”

Indeed, the area’s one-stop career centers, FutureWorks in Springfield and Career Point in Holyoke, have not only reported a massive surge in new filings, but their leaders have lamented being forced to pull limited resources away from their key missions, such as job training, to meet the need.

Geography plays some role, too, in how aggressively people pursue new jobs, Ebner explained. “There are positions in Monson and Palmer at an entry-level rate, but folks in Springfield who are unemployed are not willing to go out there,” she said. “Most people are not willing to make that drive.”

Glass Half-full

Despite those factors, Joseph Ascioti, president of Reliable Temps in Agawam, still senses a desire for work out there.

“There are more candidates. When we do off-site job fairs, we’re getting double the amount of people we did in the past,” he said — and that, in his agency’s case, has eased the skills gap somewhat.

“For instance, with some of the machine-shop positions, a year or two ago we couldn’t find anybody. But now, at least some people are responding with the skill level the company is looking for. That’s interesting. But we still have jobs, some of the higher-skilled positions, that go wanting because we can’t find the right skill set.”

At the same time, he told BusinessWest, many applicants don’t fully recognize how much an employers’ market this is, and come in with higher expectations than they should about pay and benefits.

“We’re definitely seeing more people come in,” said Ascioti, particularly on the low end of the pay scale. “But we’re also seeing some people who don’t yet understand what the reality is. Maybe they’re more willing to work a job they don’t like once they understand what’s out there.”

The fact remains, of course, that harsh realism could turn into desperation for many out-of-work individuals if the frozen job market outlasts government assistance.

“A lot of our clients are in hiring freezes right now,” said Ascioti, “and it doesn’t matter how many people we have coming in the door if we don’t have any work for them. Companies are being very cautious right now, and it’s a little worrisome. But I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll see some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Joseph Bednar can be reached at

[email protected]

Back to School

By
Richard Turner
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Cambridge College Takes an Adult Approach to Learning
Richard Turner

Richard Turner says Cambridge College excels at meeting the needs of non-traditional learners with challenging schedules.

You won’t find a football team at Cambridge College, Richard Turner said. In fact, if any students ever did play, it was probably decades ago.

That’s because, since its inception in Cambridge, Mass. in 1971, the school has always kept adult learners “at the center of its universe,” said Turner, director of the system’s Springfield campus, one of nine such regional satellites stretching from Massachusetts to Puerto Rico. That focus continues today; the average student age is 38.

And it’s clear, he said, that Springfield needs such a program more than ever.

“To some degree, we’re counter-cyclical; the worse things get, the more people flock to us for training,” he said, adding, however, that an oft-reported skills gap among Western Mass. job seekers has made the college’s role even more pronounced than in past economic downturns.

“I’m in touch with a lot of employers, and they’re starving for talent at all levels,” he continued. “So in a lot of ways, we’ve become talent brokers. Someone going through career training can plug into a network here with managers looking for skilled people, and boom, there’s a connection. I’ve seen people get hired in the halls.”

Cambridge has also long focused on diversity, both in faculty and student body, Turner added, noting that 35% to 40% of the Springfield center’s students are minorities. At a time when companies throughout the Pioneer Valley are intensely focused on developing a diverse workforce, that’s a critical element, too.

“We think diversity is the engine of innovation,” he said. “You have to practice what you preach; we don’t need diversity training here becase we live diversity.”

Career Ladder

Certificates and degrees in counseling, education, and management are among the most popular offerings at Cambridge, and schedules are created with the needs of working students — often with families — in mind; some classes can be partially conducted online.

“We’ve had people in the military deployed to Iraq who have been able to keep up with their learning with this kind of mechanism,” said Turner. “And at a time of high gas prices, the blended-learning model has been very popular.”

The students who enroll represent several different experiences, with one thing in common — the goal of a new or enhanced career.

“We get a lot of people who have progressed as far as they can in their career, and they’re bumping against an educational barrier that someone has arbitrarily set,” Turner explained. “It’s not something they were hearing 10 or 15 years ago, but now they need a master’s degree to do their job. When I started teaching, with a master’s in anything, you could teach on the college level. Now you need a doctorate.

“So there has been an escalation in the degree market,” he continued. “People who demonstrably can do their jobs are often being told that they have to go finish their education.”

Some other Cambridge students are people searching for a second career, seeking a new challenge or simply recognizing that job opportunities are better in other fields.

“Maybe someone got burned out in accounting and wants to be a teach in a third-grade classroom,” Turner said. “Talk about math experience — someone who ran an accounting department coming into that classroom, that’s a wonderful story.”

But perhaps the most dramatic stories, he told BusinessWest, involve students who had slipped through the cracks of traditional education.

“They’ve been the least-well-served, those who have not caught on anywhere else, or society has not caught onto them, but they’re very smart, very skilled, non-traditional learners,” he said. “When they come here, they get confidence. Many times, they don’t realize who they are, and we facilitate that. That’s priceless; it’s one of the most rewarding things about being here, when someone is blooming, and we’re helping them make that change happen.”

Turner had in his hand a recent front-page story from Point of View, a Springfield-based community newspaper. The article tells the story of Rafael Bones, who, partly because of family difficulties, dropped out of Commerce High School after his junior year in 1975, earned his GED, and joined the Air Force.

He forged a successful career in the service as a recruiter, but decided to return to school in recent years, earning a bachelor’s degree from American International College in 2004 and a master’s at Cambridge College this past summer, graduating with a 3.9 grade point average. This month, he became the first-ever Hispanic human resources director at Westfield State College.

“These are people who have put so many other things first,” Turner said of students like the 51-year-old Bones, who earn degrees and start new, significant careers later in life. “We see a lot of that.”

Live and Learn

Turner has been with Cambridge College since the mid-’70s and has seen enough students come through the doors to know that they don’t fall into one learning style or have one set of expectations for their education.

“We get exceptionally bright students who are not good fits with traditional educational models, but excel here,” he said. “What are the bars to entry that most educational institutions have put up? One of them is money, obviously, but another is not acknowledging differences in learning styles or in the starting places that people have.

“I’m a visual learner,” he continued. “I’ve attended five different colleges and earned three degrees, but very few places have taught in a way that matched my learning style, here or abroad. We don’t assume here that everyone has a left-brain orientation.”

That doesn’t mean, of course, that each professor doesn’t have a specific teaching style. But it does mean that Cambridge College emphasizes a more interactive style of learning than the lecture-hall model in which students keep quiet and take notes. And why not, Turner asked, when the students, with years of real-world experience behind them, bring much more to the classroom than the typical 18-year-old fresh out of high school?

“The students are resources,” he told BusinessWest. “If you’re just going to stand there and lecture them for three hours, you’re not going to tap into that resource. Instead of the ‘sage on stage,’ we’re the ‘guide by your side.’

“We’re not everyone’s cup of tea,” he added. “If your ideal is to sit in the back of the class, listen to lectures, do quizzes and exams, and be a very traditional learner, you might not like it here — but there are many places that do that, and do it well. That’s not to say we don’t have traditional students, but they would succeed anywhere because the educational world is built around them. We’re designing the educational piece around the person, rather than have the person fit the educational piece.”

As for watching football games? Well, there’s always the Patriots.

Joseph Bednar can be reached at[email protected]

The Transition Game

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Sections Supplements
Many Are Finding New, Rewarding Careers in Health Care

One worked as an electrician, another as an advertising production specialist, and a third for the post office. They all had decent jobs with good companies, but something was missing from the equation in each case. So the individuals in question transitioned into careers in health care, and became part of a nationwide trend in the process.

Ron St. Peter, a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, had a steady career with good benefits. But something was missing.
“It was a good job, but in some ways it wasn’t rewarding,” he told BusinessWest. “It didn’t fulfill my inner drive for knowledge, to learn, and to make a difference.”

St. Peter’s mother-in-law is a nurse, and she “put a bug” in his ear to test the waters in health care, he said. So he took classes in Anatomy and Biology at Holyoke Community College, and then decided he was intrigued enough to begin training as a nurse.

Today, St. Peter is continuing his education while working at Baystate Medical Center as a nursing assistant in the surgical stepdown unit, which is where patients go directly after surgery. He’d eventually like to work in the emergency room or intensive care unit — “I’d like that fast-paced, quick-decision environment where I can apply the knowledge I’ve gained and help people who really need it” — and knows he can likely write his own ticket to whatever nursing niche he wants.
That’s because the nation is in the midst of a nursing shortage that’s expected to get worse, for several reasons: Americans are living longer, the average age of nurses is currently in the 40s, and colleges are grappling with a shortage of nurse educators to teach the next generation.

So, yes, St. Peter and many others can indeed call their own shots, which is why nursing has become an attractive second career option for many. And it’s not just nursing.

Depending on the region, medical facilities nationwide are struggling with shortages of physicians and specialists ranging from physical therapists to laboratory technicians — and people working within other business sectors are taking notice.

Consider, for example, Elizabeth Bresnahan, a 1994 graduate of Western New England College, who parlayed a degree in Business Administration into a nine-year stint as an analyst with the national Dow Jones call center.

“I did lots of reporting, spreadsheets, databases, focusing on agent productivity and making things more efficient, and training my co-workers in using applications,” she said — not exactly the seeds of a career in health care.

But when the company began outsourcing many of its operations, Bresnahan saw the writing on the wall as an opportunity.

“Having a family with two small boys, my perspective started to change,” she said. “The Monday-to-Friday grind wasn’t working, and I wanted something with a little more flexibility.” She also wanted something stable in which she could advance her career without constant fear of downsizing. “Western Mass. is tough. It’s hard to find a place where you can grow and move up professionally. I didn’t want to keep starting over every two or three years.”

And as long as people get sick, she said, there will always be opportunities to help them get well. So she decided to enroll in the Respiratory Therapy program at Springfield Technical Community College, a track that tends to attract people with work experience who are looking for second careers, as opposed to recent high-school graduates.

In this issue, BusinessWest talks with several local professionals who have made, or are making, a transition into health care as a second career. The challenges of going back to school, especially after starting a family, can be daunting, but they say the rewards of a stable career with plenty of personal fulfillment are worth the effort.

Prescription for Change

A desire for a more people-oriented career played into Marla Zlotnick’s decision to switch from a 10-year stint in advertising to a new career as a pharmacy technician.

“I was a print producer — I coordinated print advertising and magazine advertising for ad agencies, and trafficking of the materials and print buying,” she said.

But she had always been oriented to community service, she explained, and longed for something with more contact with the public. Through her exposure to hospitals in her advertising career, she had come to see health care workers as a dynamic, caring group of people. So she joined them, starting with Target, which offers on-the-job training to new pharmacy techs as they work toward certification.

She now works for Baystate Health, helping pharmacists fill prescriptions and handling everything from insurance issues to inventory and ordering — and, of course, dealing with patients at the register. It’s an entry-level position, but one that affords her crucial exposure — not only to the field of pharmacy, but also to other medical professionals.

“I’ve had an opportunity to work with doctors, nurses, and patients,” she said. “Now I can decide, moving forward, if I want to go to pharmacy school, or nursing school, or something else.”

With members of the massive Baby Boom generation entering their senior years, openings for nurses, physical therapists, medical assistants, health-information technicians, and physician assistants in particular are expected to multiply over the next seven years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition, even health fields that don’t involve direct care of very ill patients, such as dieticians and counselors, are expected to grow faster than average through 2014.

Although the trend toward health care as a second career has been gaining steam in recent years, the sector has long been viewed as a stable industry for people looking for a change. Ask Paul Podmore.

It was 1994, and Podmore — an electrician with a decade of experience under his toolbelt, mainly wiring residential homes — was feeling the itch to return to school and start a second career. But what career?

He got married early that summer, and just two weeks after the wedding, his wife wound up hospitalized at UMass Medical Center in Worcester for more than two months. “I spent pretty much every day there, helping the nurses take care of her,” he said. “One of the nurses on the night shift suggested that I think about going to nursing school, which I hadn’t even thought of.”

Like St. Peter, Podmore had nurses in his family — two sisters and his mother-in-law, to be exact — and soon he decided he’d give that world a try, so he enrolled in a program at UMass Amherst, graduating in 1996.

“I’ve been doing this ever since,” he said, spending a decade in the cardiac telemetry unit at Mercy Medical Center before moving to the cardiac catheter lab at Baystate Medical Center for 17 months, then recently returning to Mercy as a nurse in the fast-paced Emergency Department.

Podmore said he enjoys interacting with people from all walks of life on the job, but admits his work often doesn’t make for cheerful dinner-table chat.

“You have to be hardworking, and you have to be compassionate. It’s humbling at some points. You’re seeing people at the core of who they are,” he told BusinessWest.

What makes the intensity worthwhile, he said, is being able to make a difference at that terrible moment in someone’s life.

“You’re working there, helping the doctor, and you see a person in the middle of a heart attack, screaming or moaning and having chest pain,” he said. “Then the blockage is opened, and a few minutes later the patient is feeling better. To be part of a team that does that, to see people improve, is very rewarding.”

Like nursing, respiratory therapy offers a range of work schedules and settings — from hospitals to nursing homes to home care — that can help families balance work and home life, Bresnahan said. But she, like the others, mainly touts the direct-care aspects of the job, and the way it promises to keep her on her toes.

“Numbers don’t lie,” she said of her former job. “One thing leads to another leads to another. But here, it’s changing all the time, and you have to be flexible. You’re working with people, not with spreadsheets or databases. Just think of the impact you have on the patient — everyone needs to breathe, and as the respiratory therapist, you have a lot of control over that.”

Counting the Cost

That’s a theme that others who spoke with BusinessWest kept returning to — the satisfaction gained from helping people at a time of need. To many such career-switchers, it’s worth the inevitable financial hit that comes not only from the loss of a steady income but the cost of tuition.

“It has been difficult, but my wife has been really understanding, and she has enabled us financially to take the loss in pay,” said St. Peter. “I’ve really enjoyed school, and I enjoy the health field now that I’m in it. The opportunities, the technology, and the ability to advance all intrigue me.”

Bresnahan called her decision very stressful and difficult, “but my husband has been very supportive,” she said. “We planned ahead and tried to anticipate what would happen. I was accustomed to being employed full-time, and I have a part-time job now.

“I also have to factor in school,” she continued. “I need time to study, but I also have a family, and the kids have homework. The first time around, going to WNEC, I only had to worry about myself, but now I have to worry about everyone around me. There’s a lot more riding on it this time, so I’m definitely taking it more seriously than before.”

The other side of the coin, said Podmore, is that health care can often provide needed scheduling flexibility for families. In fact, he was able to remain home on weekdays with his twin boys for two years, working only weekends and allowing his wife to continue her career.

“The other good thing is that this field is not dependent on the economy,” he said. “You might not get rich, but you can always find a job that provides a good, steady income.”

“It’s definitely a transition, but it’s been great,” said Zlotnick. “You have to be prepared to start again, but I think being in this field is definitely worth it.”v

The Road to Success

By
Gary and Valerie Bosselait
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Despite a Few Speed Bumps, Valley Transporter’s Progress Is On Schedule
Gary and Valerie Bosselait

Gary and Valerie Bosselait saw an unmet need in the Pioneer Valley, and rectified the situation with Valley Transporter.

Gary Bosselait remembers the early days.

“When I say we did it all, we did it all,” he said, referring to the fledgling business known as Valley Transporter, which took individuals to and from Bradley International and other airports, and the partnership he created with his sister, Valerie, in 1986. “We drove the van, maintained the van, took the appointments, everything.”

Gary, who relocated from Worcester and left a position with one of his father’s businesses, a travel agency, to launch the venture, moved into an apartment shared by Valerie and her now-ex-husband. It served as residence and office for the business. Gary kept the answering machine close to his bed so he would hear it; the calls would come at all hours of the day and night, but it was, as it is to all small business owners, a pleasant sound.

“We loved to hear the phone ring,” he said. “We still do.”

It rings much more often today, and there is a growing staff of people to answer it. They take reservations and plot schedules to keep a fleet of 14 vans busy and running cost-effectively, an often-challenging assignment given the large geographic area covered by the company.

This includes Hampshire County and parts of Hampden and Franklin counties as well. The five colleges in close proximity to the company’s headquarters on Route 116 in Amherst provide a solid base for business, said Valerie, adding that the venture’s success rests on its ability to create repeat customers.

This is accomplished by providing value — the no-frills vans provide a lower-cost alternative to limousines and taxis — and quality service; in short, getting people to the airport on time and with no hassles.

The company has handled those assignments well enough to recently record its 20th anniversary, and it has preliminary plans for expansion, possibly into the Connecticut area, on the drawing board.

In this issue, BusinessWest looks at how this business has been able to take off and handle the turbulence that faces all small businesses, but especially those in this small but challenging field.

Flights of Fancy

The Bosselaits say they’ve booked shuttle trips for a number of celebrities over the years. Astronomer Carl Sagan used the company when he was in town for a speech at UMass. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has also utilized Valley, as have a number of bands and solo artists who have come to the area for performances at area clubs like the Iron Horse in Northampton.

But the partners know that it’s not the star power of a customer base that matters in this unique sector of the economy, but its overall size — in other words, the basic business tenet known as supply and demand.

Both Bosselaits were mulling career options in the mid-’80s when they began gauging the Western Mass. market and whether it had the requisite critical mass for an airport shuttle business. The two cut their teeth in travel work at their father’s travel agency (Gary would later manage that facility), and, in the late ’70s, Valerie went to work for a small shuttle business operating in Denver.

She returned to the Pioneer Valley in 1980 and went to work for Carroll Travel in Amherst. Years later, she was trying to decide whether to go back to school or start a business, and she was helped with that decision by commentary from customers of the travel agency.

“We had people coming in all the time wondering how to get to the airport,” she explained. “There really was nothing at the time — maybe a Peter Pan bus, and not much in the way of taxi service.”

These comments became part of the discussion between the siblings during a family vacation in Maine in the summer of 1985. “We started talking about how we would love to start our own business, be it a travel agency, a tour business, or something,” Gary explained. “Val had recognized the need for a shuttle service out this way, so of all the things we bandied about, we decided on the airport shuttle.”

In hindsight, they made a smart decision, but success didn’t come quickly or simply. Nor was it expected to.

Despite outward appearances to the contrary, the airport shuttle business isn’t easy, said Gary, and profitability is elusive and often takes years to achieve, unlike with most limo services. The keys to success are a large, reliable customer base, effective scheduling that minimizes the number of unprofitable runs — those with one or a few customers in the van — without sacrificing convenience for the customer in the form of a lengthy trip in a van while picking up other riders, and word-of-mouth referrals that create new business. All this takes time.

The pace of progress was, indeed, slow, said Gary, adding that it was a full three years after the venture was launched before the two could hire their first employee — a reservations taker.

The many colleges in the region, and especially the five schools in the Amherst area, provide a rock-solid base of support, said Valerie, noting that administrators, faculty, students, their parents, and visitors all make use of Bradley International and many of those constituencies need affordable shuttle service.

And, increasingly, business stemming from the schools is year-round in nature, she explained, noting that years ago many schools shut down for the summer months, but today they rent out facilities to a wide range of groups.

Beyond the colleges, the company serves the region’s business travelers and area residents who, for one reason or another, need a lift to and from the airport. Many are looking for an affordable lift, and, with rates averaging roughly $45 for a round-trip shuttle, Valley charges about half what a limo ride would cost.

The company has encountered a number of challenges over the years, including spikes in fuel prices, which it has largely been able to absorb without resorting to surcharges, through patience and proactive steps such as purchasing smaller, more fuel-efficient vans (Honda Odysseys) for longer runs to Boston and New York.
Other challenges include the struggle to find drivers, the high cost of insuring passenger vehicles, and even fluctuations in plane ticket prices, which have impacted the bottom line.

But the biggest hurdle has been 9/11, which impacted every business in some way, but threatened many of those in travel-related ventures with their very existence. Indeed, the terrorist attacks brought all airline travel to a halt for two days, put most businesses and colleges in a state of suspended animation, canceled or postponed virtually all events and vacations that month, and prompted many to refrain from flying for extended periods of time.

“The only time the phone rang then was for cancellations,” said Gary, adding that he was exaggerating, but only slightly. “Everything came to a screeching halt. For 30 days we just sat idle, wondering what the heck was going on; virtually no one was flying.”

The Bosselaits noted with no small amount of relief that by Thanksgiving break, 2001, there was a return to something at least approaching normalcy. But it would take a year to fully recover, a feat achieved with some help from Florence Savings Bank, which eased some loan-repayment schedules.

In recent years, the company has achieved steady growth and reinvested profits in some of those smaller, more economical vans, as well as in new technology in the form of an automated reservation system, steps the partners/siblings say will position Valley for continued expansion.

Moving forward, the company hopes to translate its strong track record for customer service into larger market share, while, like any small business, looking at any and all ways to control expenses and add revenue.

The partners are looking into creating a second location in the Hartford area, which, they say, does not have a shuttle operation to Bradley. Meanwhile, they’re also exploring the possibility of turning their vans into moving billboards, in much the same way that transit buses are used for marketing area businesses and non-profits — but with obvious limitations.

“It’s something we’re looking at,” said Valerie. “We have a lot of vans, and they’re very visible. There’s some potential there.”

Final Approach

If ads are placed on the vans, they will be small and placed (probably across the back) so as not to detract from the name Valley Transporter, said Valerie.
That’s a name that has survived more than two decades, when many others in this sector have crashed and burned.

This longevity and continued growth are a tribute to resiliency and a large dose of old-fashioned hard work — plane and simple.

George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]

Building Bridges

By
Jeffrey Hayden
Sections Supplements
Business Center’s Director Forges a Game Plan for Workforce Development
Jeffrey Hayden

Jeffrey Hayden, director of the Kittredge Business Center

Holyoke Community College’s Kittredge Center for Business opened its doors in June. The $18 million facility will have a broad mission, said its director, former Holyoke planning director Jeff Hayden, but it boils down to expanding and enhancing the role that workforce development plays in economic development.

When he was planning and economic development director for the city of Holyoke, Jeffrey Hayden was one of many civic and business leaders in that community asked for input on plans to create a business center at Holyoke Community College.

Hayden doesn’t recall exactly what he offered as advice on how to shape the center and its focus, but he does remember thinking that it could become a key player in expanding the important role workforce development plays in economic development efforts in Holyoke and across the Pioneer Valley.

And now, he has a front-row seat for that performance.

Actually, as director of the recently opened facility, a post he assumed a month ago, Hayden will be more behind-the-scenes in his work, which he describes as a blend of administration and outreach, planning, and collaboration.

He joked that his first assignment is to shorten his title — ‘vice president for Business and Community Services and executive director of the Kittredge Business Center’ will barely fit on his business card — but the first real items on his to-do list are to create a business plan for the facility and to generate greater awareness of its role and how it will be carried out.

In other words, he wants area business owners and civic officials to know and understand that the center, named after Yankee Candle founder Michael Kittredge is much more than a mailing address for agencies such as the Mass. Export Center of Western Mass. and the World Institute for Strategic Economic Research (WISER). Instead, it is a resource that can, by working with other economic development agencies in the region as well as with UMass and the area’s other public and private colleges, address what he called a “disconnect” between the skills required by area employers and those possessed by many in the region’s workforce.

“We want to address that disconnect and eliminate it through effective outreach and collaboration with a number of agencies,” he said. “Our basic mission here is workforce development.”

Overall, Hayden said the role to be played by the Kittredge Center will be fluid in nature, not static. As the wants and needs of area employers and those in the workforce — and those who want to join it — change, the center will adjust accordingly.

“We want to continually look around the corner for what’s next so we can provide that for businesses, students, and residents,” he said, adding that the Kittredge Center represents the latest step in a broad workforce-development initiative in Holyoke and the college that has been building since the mid-’80s. “What’s the future model going to be? We’ll have to wait and see.”

This issue, BusinessWest talks with Hayden about the broad mission for the Kittredge Center — and also about his own career opportunity.

The Job at Hand

As he talked about that mission, Hayden drew on his own work experience, especially his 12 years in Holyoke City Hall, as an example of just one way in which he hopes the center may boost economic development efforts in the region.

“I’m a great example of what I call cooperative education,” he explained, noting that after a stint selling radio advertising and other jobs in the region, he went back to school (UMass) to pursue work in municipal planning. He first had an unpaid internship in the Holyoke Planning Office, then a paid internship in the Economic Development Office. Upon graduation, he took a full-time job in economic development, and eventually became assistant director and then director — adding the duties of city planner a few years ago.

Thus, he is a poster child of sorts for ongoing efforts on the part of regional economic development leaders to keep area graduates in this region by familiarizing them with job opportunities here and giving them reasons to stay.

“When it comes to this market, if we can get people to try it on, to take it for a test drive, to get a taste for it, then we can get more graduates to stay here,” he told BusinessWest, adding that the test drive analogy works not only for employment opportunities, but for college enrollment as well.

“How is a school like HCC going to continually grow its enrollment unless it develops a number of feeder systems that will bring new students?” he asked, adding that the Kittredge Center will work with a number of agencies to help provide literacy training, adult basic education, and other programs designed to motivate individuals to take the next step — a college education.

Providing these test-drive opportunities, in the form of GED preparation, internships, co-ops, and training programs, was one of the motivations for HCC leaders when they blueprinted the concept of a business center close to a decade ago. The broad vision was for a one-stop facility that would place several agencies under one roof — a green, environmentally friendly roof — thus linking employers, students, and area residents with a host of resources.

“One of the practical considerations of the facility is that it takes a number of programs that were somewhat disconnected because of space and brings them together,” he explained. “Hopefully, that synergy will allow us to do more and build upon what’s been accomplished to date.”

The 55,000-square-foot, five-story Kittredge Center is now home to the school’s Business Division, as well as HCC’s Community Services Department, which offers personal enrichment courses, adult basic education programs, educator professional development credit programs, GED preparation and testing, and youth summer programs.

The center also hosts a number of economic development and workforce development-related agencies, including:

  • HCC’s Center for Business and Professional Development, which offers a wide range of workforce development services designed to assess employee skills, identify knowledge gaps, and conduct training to remediate deficiencies;
  • WISER, home to the country’s leading database for international trade statistics, which relocated to HCC from UMass in 2005; and
  • The Western Mass. office of the Mass. Export Center, will offers market research, export training, and international business development resources.

The center also features 4,000 square feet of conference/meeting spaces — available for reservation by area businesses and organizations — equipped with high-speed and wireless Internet, videoconferencing, and state-of-the-art lighting and projection.

The sum of these various parts could best be described as a “regional asset,” said Hayden, adding that it his job to continually refine that asset and to ensure that the region and its business community are taking full advantage of it.

When asked what motivated him to take on that assignment, Hayden said that he was ready for a new career challenge, and considered the Kittredge Center’s evolving mission to be a new and different type of work in economic development.

“This was a great opportunity for me to stay in Holyoke and continue to work to make this a better, more vibrant community,” he said, noting that his assignments in City Hall were focused on bringing jobs and progress to the city. “Our basic mission is workforce development.”

By that, he meant collaborative efforts to address both the quality and quantity of the region’s workforce, which will need a wide array of skills to succeed in the modern workplace. To make area residents workforce-ready, and to assist business owners in their efforts to make their ventures more competitive, the center will partner with a number of local and regional entities, said Hayden.

These include the college; the city of Holyoke and its planning and economic development leaders; the Holyoke Chamber of Commerce, which has a number of training and job-matching programs; UMass, and other area colleges.

“We’re looking for every opportunity to make a better workforce development system,” he said. “And that can only happen through effective partnerships.”

One important early assignment for Hayden is to create broad awareness of the center, its various components, and the opportunities they provide for area residents and business owners.

This awareness will be generated through targeted marketing, said Hayden, noting that he intends to be quite visible in the community, driving home the point that the center is much more than its four walls. Indeed, it is what he called a bridge — between the college and the community, and between business owners and future employees.

Having built the bridge, said Hayden, the college wants to motivate people to use it.

Course of Action

When asked for a basic job description for his new post, Hayden told BusinessWest that it comes down to “keeping the college — and the region — on the cutting edge of workforce development.”

The school has a great track record in that realm, he continued, and it is now his challenge to not only continue that tradition but enhance it through effective partnerships and more of that ‘looking around the corner,’ as he called it.

By doing so, he believes the center can be a driving force in the biggest overall challenge facing regional economic development leaders — making the Pioneer Valley and its businesses competitive.

While doing all that, Hayden might still find some time to shorten the title on his business card.

George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]

Making A Case For The RN/JD

By
Jill Lyons, Diane Fernald, and Heather Beattie
Sections Supplements
Nurses Bring Unique Background to Practice of Law
Jill Lyons, Diane Fernald, and Heather Beattie

RN/JDs, from left: Jill Lyons, Diane Fernald, and Heather Beattie

They’re called RN/JDs – nurses who have gone on to earn a law degree. Their ranks are growing as law firms recognize the value of having individuals with a strong health care background on their team, not only to evaluate malpractice cases, but to help both individual physicians and giant health care systems navigate in an increasingly regulated environment.

As an administrator at Wingate at Wilbraham, a skilled nursing facility, and before that as vice president of Nursing for Noble Hospital in Westfield, Diane Fernald said she would often ‘bump against the law” in her work.

By that, she meant that, in addition to the obvious health care aspects to her duties, there were also legal issues – everything from real estate questions to new state and federal regulations to matters of liability to contend with. The more she encountered these legal questions and answers, the more intrigued she became.

So, in 1994, she decided to do more than bump against the law; she decided to make it a new career.

That was the start of a sequence of events that eventually made Fernald part of the Health Care Practice Group at the law firm Morrison Mahoney LLP, which has offices in several major cities throughout the Northeast. Fernald is one of three (soon to be four) registered nurses working in the firm’s Springfield office who left that field to earn law degrees and now blend their talents in both realms to provide a unique level of experience to clients.

Indeed, the group, which also includes fellow RN/JDs Heather Beattie and Jill Lyons, is enabling Morrison Mahoney to expand its scope of work – primarily in medical malpractice defense – to areas that include regulatory compliance, managed care contracting, credentialing, licensing and privileging issues, peer review, practice formation and acquisition, risk management, and others.

The nurse-lawyers bring to each of these specialty areas a unique eye, said John Bagley, a partner with Morrison Mahoney. “We’re able to review regulations notjust with a lawyer’s eye, but with the help ofnurse-attorneys who can talk the talk, ifyou will, understand medicine, and alsounderstand the practical aspects, as well,”he explained. “So it’s not just a bunch oflawyers sitting around telling doctors howto practice medicine; it’s lawyers with theknowledge of how the real world of healthcare works counseling clients.”

And by melding their experiences in health care and law, Beattie, Fernald, and Lyons, can offer some unique insight that can help clients after a suit has been filed, but also assist them avoiding claims, and thus the courtroom.

“We’re not just assisting clients in litigation,” Bagley explained. “We’re helping them avoid litigation.”

The Verdict Is In

Beattie recalled for BusinessWest one recent case involving a caregiver and a malpractice suit filed against her.

“She cried for two hours; she just didn’t believe that someone would question the care she gave and believe she was negligent,” said Beattie. “I explained to her how simple it is for someone to bring a lawsuit these days and how she shouldn’t be upset by it”

That case offers just one example of how attorneys with a background in nursing understand both the technical and emotional aspects of legal matters involving health care professionals. Thus, they can provide a level of service that someone with a JD (juris doctor, or law degree) and not a degree in nursing couldn’t bring to the table, said Bagley.

He told BusinessWest that he and partner Dennis Anti recognized an emerging trend in the health and legal professions – nurses going back to school to obtain law degrees – and have expanded their practice to include many of these unique professionals.

There are many reasons why individuals choose to take that route, said Beattie, who worked as a nurse for 20 years – mostly in neurosurgery and intensive care – before earning her law degree from Western New England. Some get tired of the long hours, strange shifts, and lost holidays, she said, while others (and she put herself in this category)“get tired of assisting 300-poundpeople out of bed.”

But perhaps the biggest reason for the career shift is the growing number of opportunities for those who can place ‘RN, JD’ after their names, said Fernald. The increasingly litigious nature of society has created some of these opportunities, she said, noting that long-term care, one of her many specialities (as both as a nurse and a lawyer) has found itself the target of a growing number of negligence suits.

But there are also new waves of rules and regulations that health care providers must live under, said Lyons, listing HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountabilty Act of 1996, as just one example of new compliance issues facing constituencies ranging from single-physician practices to health care systems.

To help providers navigate these increasingly treacherous waters, law firms are reaching out to individuals with a legal and health care backgrounds, said Anti, noting that Morrison Mahoney is setting the standard in this new hiring trend.

“We’re not creating a market for these services,” he explained. “The market was already there; we’re trying to meet a recognized need in the health care community.”

Together, Beattie, Fernald, and Lyons have more than 70 years of work in nursing and health care administration to their credit. They pursued law degrees for different reasons, but Beattie might have spoken for all of them when she said, “I wanted to pursue something I could do until I was 70 or 75.”

A growing number of nurses are thinking in those same terms, said Fernald, noting that most law school classes now include at least one RN, and many have several. Meanwhile, many colleges have created courses or degree programs to address the emerging trend; Elms College in Chicopee has a new program in ‘Legal Nurse Consulting.’

There is a also a national organization for such professionals – The National Assoc. of Nurse Attorneys, which has more than 1,000 members and dozens of chapters, the closest in Boston.

The reasons behind the surge in RN, JDs are many, said Bagley, but primarily, such individuals can offer a perspective – and, therefore, a level of expertise – that those without a background in health care cannot.

“Dennis and I come from strictly a legal background – legal education and legal training – and, over the course of 20 yearsplus each, we’ve learned a lot of medicine,” he explained. “But the RN, JDs … they’ve worked in those environments and that makes it easier for them to communicate with the client and advise the client on how to address these problems we’re seeing in these lawsuits.”

Case Files

The three RN, JDs at Morrison Mahoney bring different strengths and layers of experience to the table. Fernald, who served as administrator of Wingate at Wilbraham for six years (1988 to 1994) and before that served the facility as director of Nursing, specializes in long-term care defense. This includes work with nursing homes, rehab centers, and assisted living facilities. She also handles medical malpractice defense, product liability, and professional liability representation.

She first worked with Bagley at the Springfield firm Egan Flanagan, and Cohen, and later worked for the Commonwealth as an attorney and Medicare program manager, handling Medicare and Medicaid appeals and thirdparty liability.

Beattie told BusinessWest that, while in law school at WNEC, she considered getting into criminal work. She interned at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Hartford, and, later, in district court in Springfield. She opted, ultimately, for work that involved both of her professional degrees.

In 1999, she became the first RN / JD to join Morrison Mahoney, and since then has cultivated a multi-faceted practice that includes medical malpractice and product liability defense, general insurance defense, representation of physicians and nurses in Board of Registration in Medicine and Board of registration in Nursing complaints, and general health-law litigation.

Lyons became the latest addition to the team in June. A 2003 graduate of the Massachusetts School of Law, she did some consulting work for the Nashoba Valley Medical Center and also served as interim director of its emergency department. She later joined Worcester Medical Center as director of risk management and patient safety officer.

In those roles, she actually became a client of Morrison Mahoney, working extensively with Beattie and Anti. As the need for additional RN, JD at the firm became evident, work to recruit Lyons ensued and then escalated.

A fourth nurse/lawyer could be hired in the near future, said Bagley, noting that, while law firms are generally conservative when it comes to expanding staff, there is a definite need within the market for the unique blend of talents that RN/JDs can provide.

Together, the RN/JDs will help Morrison Mahoney achieve goals common to every law firm, said Bagley – expanding the client list, while also providing a wider array of services to existing clients.

Final Arguments

As they talk about the health care profession and their work as nurses, Beattie, Fernald, and Lyons all use the present tense – and with good reason.

That’s because while they’re all working a law firm, they are still nurses. In fact, as Fernald told BusinessWest, they are better nurses now than when they were in the field because of what they’ve learned in their new profession.

But, ultimately, they are more than nurses. They are RN/JDs, and thus on the cutting edge of what would have to be considered a healthy career track – literally.

George O’Brien can be reached at[email protected]

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