One of our newest employees here at Hollis Montessori isn’t actually that new. John Schulte, the new HMS Facilities Manager, has been helping out around the school both as a volunteer and as a contractor for several years now. Now that John is an official employee, we have 3 generations of his family at the school. John’s daughter, Sarah Gilleeny, is the lead guide in the Lower Elementary II classroom, and her three children are students at Hollis Montessori.
HMS Facilities Manager John Schulte
When Sarah started working at the school, John started volunteering to help the school with repairs. His older grandchildren started attending the school around that time, making it “even more appealing to spend some time there.” “Fortunately,” says John, “most of the issues at the school are not complex and could be handled easily.” So John became our go-to handyman for a few years. As time went on, the job of managing and organizing the information surrounding buildings and grounds upkeep became larger and larger, and the HMS Board of Directors voted to create an entirely new position, Facilities Manager, to help track current work, and plan for future work. John Schulte was the obvious choice for the job—he already knew the school and most of the systems involved.
John has taken a circuitous route to becoming a Facilities Manager. He has always “been interested in how machinery and equipment works—that theme has been in my life no matter what my career has been.” After working at a garden center in high school, he pursued a degree in horticulture at Michigan State University. Along with horticulture, John took some business classes, and that led to an acceptance at Harvard Business School. The acceptance was conditional on his gaining work experience, so he and his new wife Marsha moved to Florida so he could work in marketing for an agricultural company.
After getting his MBA from Harvard, John and Marsha moved to Western Massachusetts, where he spent the next 32 years working for paper manufacturer Crane & Co. Crane offered John “more machinery than could be imagined and lots of learning about how it all worked.” Crane, a family business founded in 1801, now being run by the 7th generation of the family, kept John “intrigued and interested through roles in manufacturing, general management and the last 10 years as the head finance person for the Company.”
When Sarah and her husband John moved to Pepperell, MA, John and Marsha moved to Hollis to be closer to them and their grandchildren, as well as her brother Ian and his family in Jefferson, NH.
John says that while his projects aren’t all successes, they’re always memorable. In college, when he disassembled the squeaky clutch in his first car, he “couldn't get it back together, had it towed to a garage, and endured a great amount of laughter and ribbing as they repaired it.” In addition, “Marsha has some fond memories of my plumbing efforts over the years.” While working for Crane, he and Marsha built a post and beam house and he acted as the general contractor. He worked on the land clearing, foundation, interior trim, electrical, cabinets, porches and decks, and the painting. John says it was a “wonderful experience learning how things work, collecting more tools, and getting a change up from daily work at Crane.” So when he came to Hollis Montessori, it was “with a great tool collection, enough knowledge about a range of equipment to get into trouble and a love of figuring things out and getting them to work right.”
One of the things John likes most about working at Hollis Montessori is that his grandchildren are here. He enjoys seeing them but he also “likes being able to demonstrate to them by actions the value of working with your hands and the excitement, problem solving, and reward that comes with it.” In addition, “the overall school philosophy and that of individuals who work here fit well with my love of hands on, try it, fix it, make it better.” It provides a “nice fit between what I love to do and some of the knowledge and skills the school works to impart in the students.”
It is clear to anyone watching that John enjoys spending time with children. Recently, while fixing the drywall on a post in the school lobby, Lower Elementary student Ryan Kingsborough came by and asked what he was doing. The result was Ryan learning to spackle drywall. “I do like to share what I have learned with anyone interested,” says John, “and the Montessori school feeds that in the children… questions, wanting to try things, building, creating, taking apart… my strength is some patience to help that process with the kids because I love what we are talking about or doing together.”
John enjoys the time he spends with kids because “it lets me be a bit silly… all the grandchildren fully understand the meaning of "shenanigans", [have] done shenanigans with me, and have laughed at my stories. If that fun and interpersonal exchange and mutual enjoyment can come with a lesson in how to do something, so much the better.”
We are all so happy to welcome John to the HMS staff. He says his philosophy of doing the maintenance job “is based on two concepts: I went to Harvard, what could possibly go wrong??!!” And when things inevitably go wrong, “always have a plan B!”