If you walk through the front doors of Mabel Woolsey Elementary, there’s a good chance you’ll meet Jamie Harter before anyone else.

As the school’s lone office secretary—serving a student body of 400—Jamie is far more than a receptionist. She’s the pulse of the building. The gatekeeper. The comforter. The problem-solver. The name every kindergartener learns within the first week of school and the voice every parent hears when they call with a question, a worry, or a quick heads-up that someone left their lunch at home again.

And yet, just a few years ago, Jamie hadn’t planned on working in Knoxville at all.

She began her career in education as a paraprofessional and interventionist in Galesburg, serving for nearly a decade. But when the COVID-19 pandemic shut schools down, uncertainty followed. Knoxville returned to in-person learning before Galesburg did, and one of the staff members at Mabel Woolsey reached out: Would Jamie consider coming over to help out?

She did—and never left.

“I started as a reading intervention aide,” she says. “They knew I’d done that in Galesburg, and I was happy to be back in a school. It felt good to be needed again.”

Eventually, she moved into the front office. At first, she shared the workload with another secretary. But when that position was vacated, Jamie took on the entire role—alone.

“Now I’m the only secretary for 400 students,” she says with a smile. “It’s a lot. But I love it.”

And it shows.

Jamie brings a rare blend of compassion, competence, and calm to the chaos of a busy elementary school. She tracks absences, manages records, welcomes visitors, and coordinates transportation—all while soothing anxious students and fielding an endless stream of questions from every direction.

“It’s like juggling,” she laughs. “But instead of bowling pins, it’s chainsaws.”

Still, she wouldn’t trade it. While she misses the one-on-one connection of her RTI days, she sees her current role as just as important—just in a different way.

“Now I get to connect with the whole community,” she says. “Not just the kids, but the parents, the caregivers, the extended families. That’s special.”

Jamie’s perspective is shaped not just by her job, but by her life. She’s a parent herself, with children in the Galesburg schools, and she serves on the Galesburg School Board—a role that gives her a broader view of education policy and the shared challenges facing rural schools across the region.

“It helps me understand what’s happening beyond the walls of this building,” she says. “But I’m always careful—my board service is in a different district. There’s no conflict, just insight.”

What she brings to Mabel Woolsey isn’t easily quantified. It’s in the way she remembers a student’s birthday, calms a parent who’s running late, or notices when a child seems off—even if no one else has said anything.

“I’m not a teacher,” she says, “but I’m still part of the team. And I take that seriously.”

She describes the staff at Mabel Woolsey as a family—and it’s clear she means it. “We support one another,” she says. “We laugh together, we cover for each other when things get busy. And we really care about the kids.”

In a world that can sometimes feel impersonal or rushed, Jamie Harter offers something else: presence. She knows the names. The routines. The rhythms. She catches the quiet things—the details no one writes down, but that make a child feel seen.

“I may not be the administrator,” she says, “but I’m often the first face they see—and sometimes the one they remember most.”

And for hundreds of Knoxville families, that first face is exactly the one they needed.