He knew exactly what he was getting into, and was all for it.
Eric Smoker has spent his entire life in the Fairfield school district, growing up as a student and then getting his diploma from here. His professional life found him back on campus, working in the Fairfield maintenance department. A job opened up this past spring and Smoker couldn’t pass it up.
Already with knowledge of the lay of the land and how most everything in the works, Smoker was perfectly suited to be tabbed as Fairfield’s Coordinator of District Grounds and Maintenance, to which he was appointed to the role in mid-May.
“It was a very proud moment,” noted Smoker. “The acknowledgement that I got from everybody, I am actually doing what I am supposed to be doing and doing it well. People are actually recognizing it. It’s a good feeling.”
Smoker is taking over a little bit of a mess, quite literally. With construction going on all over the Jr/Sr high campus, the dream layout isn’t spread out for him. But he has begun the beautification process at the elementary schools, specifically with the summer help of student workers.
“I want them to take pride in their school,” Smoker said of the summer high school staff. “Each are assigned to a school. Show them and go with them so they know how I want it done. Let them do their thing and see if they take pride in what they are doing. If not, we’ll go back over it. Hopefully they are learning something by doing the work.”
Smoker does have a vision of what the four schools can and should look like from a beautification standpoint. The construction is of course blocking that path at Fairfield, which has put Smoker in a lot of landscape and production meetings he otherwise deferred to Tim Leer, the school’s Director of Facilities and Maintenance, in the past. Now he’s sitting in the conversations, offering his opinion on how it should go.
“I’d help Tim whenever he needed help, now I have to go to the landscape meetings,” Smoker said with a laugh. “I have to take that part on with this job. For example, they have a lot of different types of flowers going back there (around the new athletic fields), there are a lot of flowers and trees. Half the battle is keeping them alive, but also know what’s going in back there so we can take care of it properly.”