Kennedy Orr is right where she wants to be. The 2016 Wiscasset Middle High School graduate is now the school’s administrative assistant, a past student serving today’s, and working with some of the same staff she learned from for years.

Orr, still of Wiscasset, said in a phone interview Feb. 3, she started Nov. 16. Students’ masks have made it harder for her to learn faces. “But I’m getting there.” 

After WMHS, Orr got two degrees in business administration: an associate’s at Southern Maine Community College in Brunswick and a bachelor’s at University of Maine at Augusta. Those studies are helping her now. Her work includes billing and ordering, and helping prepare the next budget. And she helps plan school events, like Winter Carnival and graduation.

“It’s really fulfilling to work in the community that you live in. I know a lot of the teachers here, because I had them. And I know a lot of the students who are siblings of my friends that I went to school with here.”

What is it like being back? “Really cool, and it’s definitely different,” including having her past teachers as co-workers. “So they look at me in a different way now, but it’s really nice to have that basis for a relationship.” And some of the students are younger, she noted. Her class was the first to graduate with seventh and eighth grade in the building. Now sixth is there, too.

She looks forward to students’ eventual full return so she can get to know them better, she said. Meanwhile, their gradual return has helped her ease into the job. So has a predecessor: Shelley Schmal did the job 24 years, then in 2015 moved from the high school office to the school department’s central office, as finance manager, retiring in 2018, according to Wiscasset Newspaper files.

“She knows everything, both sides of it, the school side and the finance. So anything I ask, she immediately knows the answer to,” Orr said. “So that has been great.” Like Schmal did, Orr, 22, plans to stay many years. “I really love it here ... Over the years, I’ll eventually see kids of kids. It will be nice seeing families move through the system.”

WMHS Technology Coordinator/VHS Site Coordinator/Student Council Advisor Deb Pooler remembers Orr’s school years and is thrilled Orr is back. “She is a great addition to WMHS. She is someone who does the job with true passion! She has done an outstanding job with students and staff. She is truly happy to be working in ‘her’ school,” Pooler wrote in text replies. “I am so glad she is there. She feels the same way I do about the school.”

Off the job, Orr runs. And she works. She is a server at Water Street Kitchen & Bar. She worked at another Wiscasset restaurant, Little Village Bistro, throughout high school and college.

Asked if she would like to get anything across to readers, she reiterated what a good place WMHS is to work and be. “Kids are really happy to come here. It’s just a really positive place to be right now throughout this whole pandemic, and it really makes me happy coming to work every day and seeing the kids and talking to them.”