Plumb has seen more than one side of life in Newton

There isn’t much Diane Plumb’s two careers have in common.

However, the two occupations she’s held over the past 30 years have given her a somewhat unique perspective on life in Newton. Plumb, who spent 20 years with the Maytag Corporation, has been with the Newton Community School District for the past 10 years, and she’ll be retiring from the district this month.

Plumb worked for Maytag in office environments, whereas her Newton Schools role has been as Berg Middle School’s guidance office secretary.

“The culture is so different,” Plumb said. “You’re talking about going from an office with cubicles to an environment with lots of incoming phone calls and a bell ringing every 45 minutes.”

Plumb said much of her last 10 years at Maytag were largely devoted to setting the travel schedule of Gordon Jump, the actor known as “The Maytag Repairman” from 1989 until 2003. She ended up working for Maytag for exactly 20 years — she was hired in May 1986, and she left when her department was eliminated in May 2006.

Plumb said it seemed a number of Maytag employees lost their jobs in 2004. While the population of Newton didn’t really plummet as some anticipated would happen when Maytag downsized and eventually closed, there were many who had neighbors and colleagues move away.

“Those were tough times,” Plumb said. “A lot of our neighbors were a part of the (Maytag) sales force.”

Plumb said she doesn’t hear much mention of Maytag from this year’s Berg seventh- and eighth-graders, who were all born in the 2000s. There is the occasional mention of TPI, Newton’s largest industrial employer.

Being the guidance secretary has given Plumb a glimpse of Newton from a completely different perspective. As the gatekeeper to guidance counselor Tracee VanArkel, Plumb learns about the triumphs and challenges of getting through middle school and hears many details of the lives of students.

“Parents usually have real specific questions about their kids, like about attendance or grades,” Plumb said. “Students, on the other hand, could have any number of things going on with them on a particular day.”

Plumb attended Berg herself from 1969 to 1973, when it housed the sixth through the ninth grades.

“Newton had so many kids then, when we got to Berg, we were meeting kids that had lived their whole lives a few miles from us, and yet we didn’t meet until we got here,” she said.

She said she was able to draw on her experience there and as a middle schooler when dealing with students — and her experience as a parent proved to be valuable, too.

“I raised two sons, and I remember what it was like to be a girl that age,” Plumb said. “Boys and girls have some of the same sets of issues, but have gender-specific ones, too. I always tried to remember that.”

Plumb said personal and classroom technology have created new challenges and issues middle school students didn’t have in the early 1970s.

Eligibility for athletics and other extra-curricular activities or events is another subject where there are many parent and staff questions. Berg Middle School Athletic Director Bill Liley, who is also the Newton High School boys basketball head coach, praised Plumb for the many ways the secretary helped him in 2015-16, his first year with the district.

Plumb said seeing former Berg students become successful — be it academically in high school and college, or professionally or in the community — is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a middle school employee. Likewise, it’s tough to see students struggle in various ways when they showed promise at Berg.

“You just want to see all the kids go down a positive path,” she said. “And it’s so great to see it when they do. There is nothing that makes a school or a town more proud than to have one of their own graduate college at or near the top of their class.”

While a secretary defers to other school staff to advise and counsel students, a secretary often is the first to hear about an intense positive or negative experience of a middle-schooler.

“I can listen,” Plumb said. “Sometimes, that’s all a kid wants someone to do.”

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com