Thank You from WWCC

A Community of Friends
Patrick Rankin, Director of Financial Aid
Western Wyoming Community College

The first clue that something was amiss was that my truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot at ten minutes before eight on the morning of January 2, 2001. This was to be our first day back to work after our college's holiday break. Could I have gotten it wrong? Was the first day back supposed to be the 3rd? What did everyone else know that I didn't? After some time I found a living breathing human being who looked at me with sympathy for being the only person in this town of 20,000 that didn't know the college suffered a major fire the previous evening. Our campus is all interconnected, except for the dormitories. The fire took place in our boiler room and power plant area. The smoke spread throughout our campus and a large portion of our maintenance area was destroyed. We were without power, phones and the ability to enter our building.

By the morning of the 3rd we had started setting up our student services function in our only operating dormitory. Our water to our other dormitories was shut off. The financial aid office consisted of two tables one PC and one laptop. We did not have our files, software, phones and most of what we needed to process and package financial aid awards. We were, however, open and assisting students as best as we could. This was the case until two days before classes began on the January 16. Our college personnel and contractors from around the region did an extraordinary job in getting our campus functioning and classes started on time. We were able to disburse financial aid on time and were fully operational on the first day of classes.

I write this brief story of the fire to point out what a great association and community of financial aid friends we have here in the Rocky Mountain Region. From the moment that other colleges, financial aid offices and student loan institutions found out about our troubles, I received endless offers of assistance. Northwest College in Northern Wyoming provided us a pizza lunch for our entire student services area. Wyoming Student Loan Corporation designated one person to keep in touch with us, as our only means of communication at the time was email. They even sent us a care package to cheer us up. It included plastic fire hats, marshmallows, a squirt gun and assorted other fire related fun stuff. We really needed a good laugh. We even had a few Deans offer to take some of our students. Imagine that. As we are still feeling the effects of being two weeks behind, we would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of our friends in the financial aid community who offered and provided assistance. RMASFAA is chalked full of caring and concerned financial aid professionals. We truly are a community of friends. Thank you from the faculty, staff and students at Western Wyoming Community College.