A life in service of care

Debra Nott, Director of Health Services

I go back to a time when women had very little power. When I was in college, my options, as were for most women, were teacher or nurse, or mother and housewife or both. And when I was in college, I attended some group sessions that were called “women’s consciousness raising sessions,” and the idea there was to convince us that we were the equals of men, because most of us didn’t think so; we weren’t trained to believe that growing up. It was surprising; I did not expect to discover that I was equal to men.

It was hard to get credit cards in our own name, and everything we did was valued less than a man doing the same thing, and we were paid less as well. But it was very common to believe that that was perfectly fine, because men had to support a family and women did not – women were just there for extra money. It’s hard to imagine today that women would have to be taught that.

Being a mother has taught me a lot about taking care of students, because it familiarized me with all of the stages of life, from birth, to launching a successful adults, and especially at the lower school, and transitional kindergarten, where the parents are new at parenting, I find it very helpful to be able to bring in decades of parenting experience to assist the parents with things that they are seeing for the first time.

I certainly always wanted to go into a health care profession, and I think by interest, and by my general personality, I would just like to help people and make them feel better. The thing I like best about my job is that every day, at the end of the day, I know I made a lot of people feel better. Their lives were better, because I was involved with them that day. And what more can you ask for [in] a profession? How more rewarding can it be?