Voices Ringing Blog /

What are your job responsibilities and duties?

My biggest responsibility is overseeing the operations of everybody assigned to the Riverside Police Department road patrol. 

What are the daily tasks you perform.

To cover the day, we have two, twelve-hour shifts.  My direct link to the 22 patrol guys are my four sergeants.  I monitor them, and they monitor the patrol guys. I’m not actually out on patrol unless needed. If there is a critical incident, I respond.  On a day-to-day basis, it’s a lot of policy revision, and I split grant writing duties with the other major. There’s also a lot of use of force reviews, pursuit reviews, and any felony reports I review after the sergeants. 

Why is your work considered essential?

At a time when we’re dealing with COVID-19, but also in general, police are often referred to as “The Thin Blue Line”.  We’re a nation, state, city, and county of laws.  No matter what, we provide support to people who can’t take care of themselves. There are still people who victims of crime and medical emergencies. Even during a pandemic, nothing stops.  We prepare our operations for how we’re going to respond to [particular cases], how are we going to patrol, how are we going to keep our guys protected, how we’re going to support our fire department.

What precautions are you taking to ensure coronavirus safety?

With coronavirus, [criminal] activity has dropped greatly, and we’ve rolled into Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) and Emergency Command Center.  Those have been up and running since early March.  As this whole thing has unfolded, we’ve done it in stages with a blend of what the Centers for Disease Control has been sending us through update portals that go directly to police departments and other services we subscribe to.  We’ve also been monitoring what’s going on globally, within the country, and most importantly to us, what’s going on within the state of Ohio. Initially, all we drew down our response to different types of calls and instead doing everything we can over the telephone.  This has become vital for us to lean on our dispatchers.  They’re screening calls to see if it can be conducted over a telephone call.  That has allowed us to dramatically decrease the in-person response.  When it all kicked off, we started social distancing and pulled all of [the City of Riverside’s] Personal Protection Equipment out of storage and took count between us and the fire department to determine how much we have and how long we can go on with it.  The mayor also declared an emergency which gives us the ability to supersede contracts to give us more flexibility with our staff.  Our guys are wearing N-95 masks and gloves when they respond to calls. When we’re arresting somebody, we put them into a surgical mask, and they’re evaluated at the Montgomery County Jail for COVID-19 screening.

What are the lessons you learned at Carroll High School that are helping you navigate this situation professionally and personally?

The biggest thing is the quality and level of education that I was able to receive at Carroll, and part of it is faith-based.  You understand that you have to be prepared. Going through Carroll, the University of Dayton, the police academy, and 25 years of working in law enforcement prepared me for the moment; it isn’t too big.  It gives you a chance to think critically. The worst thing you could do is just react without sitting down, planning, and thinking about the consequences of which direction you’re going to go. Dealing with my job in general, it’s always easier when you have a strong faith to fall back on.  You see the worst in people, and it’s easy to get cynical about why things are happening. My faith has allowed me to realize always that there are way more good people in the world than bad.

Editors' Note: During the coronavirus pandemic, we are featuring alumni who work in essential fields to learn more about how social distancing and other changes are affecting their critical professions.  Please contact Director of Communications Michael Franz '05 if you know an alumni with an essential job who would like to share their story with the Carroll community.

Meet AJ Williams '03, Greene County Clerk of Courts

What are your job responsibilities and duties?

The Clerk of Courts is the keeper of the records for the Greene County Court of Common Pleas and all automobile title transfers, swears in all trial jurors, and reads the verdict in criminal trials.

What are the daily tasks that your office performs?

We make sure that filings reach the courts and judges on time.  We also receive orders from the judges to issue warrants from our office, and we get it to the police department so they can make arrests.

Why is your work considered essential?

The Supreme Court of the State of Ohio ruled that all Common Pleas Courts are essential and are to remain open, so we didn’t need to make a decision.  It was pretty helpful for us to have that decision from the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Maureen O’ Connor. The main tag line they used in the ruling is that we need to continue to provide citizens access to justice.  For dealings with the clerks, that includes someone who is filing for a civil protection order or someone who is trying to pay a fine from a criminal case. We need to provide [those services] to our citizens. We can’t just shut that down and say, “I understand you need a civil protection order, but we can’t file it right now,” and hope for the best.

What precautions are you taking to ensure you’re not spreading the coronavirus?

Our volume of work has gone down tremendously, so we’ve gone to half staff.  Half of our staff works one week, and the next staff comes in the next week. We’ve done that for three weeks now.  We’ve had the luxury of not needing to have everyone in the office and allowing people to stay home for a week. We have a thermometer scan every day, and no one’s had a fever.  We also have drop boxes outside the courthouse and have a lot of phone calls every day to keep people outside the courthouse for their safety and our safety.

What are the lessons you learned at Carroll High School that are helping you navigate this situation professionally and personally?

Going through St. Helen School, Carroll High School, and the University of Dayton, I learned that it’s always about service.  All the lessons I learned through my Catholic upbringing and family is service above self, and it always has been. There was never a time when I thought we need to close this down, but we need to find a way to serve the public no matter what.  Some of the staff was afraid to come in, and my stance was for them to stay home, feel safe, and not worry about their jobs, but I’ve been in every day at both offices. I’ve been at the title office alone because I need to provide that service.  I learned it at St. Helen, it was reinforced at Carroll, and it was reinforced at UD. Through my Catholic education, service has been instilled in me, and that’s the only way to operate.

Editors' Note: During the coronavirus pandemic, we are featuring alumni who work in essential fields to learn more about how social distancing and other changes are affecting their critical professions.  Please contact Director of Communications Michael Franz '05 if you know an alumni with an essential job who would like to share their story with the Carroll community.

My name is Lori Hallmark, and I am an assurance partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). My current role there primarily includes serving as an audit partner in our Private Company Services team in the Cincinnati office. In addition to my day to day role as an audit partner, I am also a part of the national team that helps determine the audit methodology, tools, and technology used by more than 2,000 team members nationally in our Private Company Services practice.

Climbing the ladder at PwC

I joined PwC after graduating from the University of Dayton (UD). Since joining PwC, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to serve in a number of different roles within the Firm. I started my time as a tax associate but quickly learned that completing tax returns was not for me! I watched the audit staff spend their time with clients every day, learning about how businesses work and getting to know people within the organization. I quickly knew that I wasn’t meant to be hanging out in the office every day and that working directly with clients to help them meet their business objectives was something that would really resonate with me. As I spent more time in the audit practice, I came to really enjoy working particularly with private company clients and understanding how the auditing standards could be applied differently in our audit work. This led to a number of different roles from consulting with teams on the application of auditing standards all the way to spending 18 months in our Tampa, Fla., office with a global team helping to rewrite the manual that PwC uses to conduct its audits.

Foundational Catholic education

Fortunately, my time at both UD and Carroll High School really prepared me to take on challenging assignments and provided me with the basis I needed to be successful. While I didn’t take any business classes in my time at Carroll, I did take plenty of challenging courses that taught me what it meant to be a life long learner. These courses taught me not just about text book learning, but how to apply that learning in the real world. Whether it was Science Fair or Youth in Government, being able to work in teams in an experiential way provided me with a strong basis for how I operate in the business world today. More important than anything I learned in specific course work though are the lessons I learned about the kind of person I wanted to be. Carroll provided me with one of my first significant opportunities to experience the joy of providing service to others. Through Action Appalachia, I worked with my classmates collecting donations of clothing to take to those who needed it. As we loaded the semi and prepared for the trip, I looked forward to spending time with my friends on what I expected to be a fun trip. I didn’t realize that the truly rewarding part of this would be seeing the real value of making a difference in someone else’s life.

Continuing a Carroll legacy

All of these lessons have been instrumental to me as an individual, but I saw Carroll from an entirely new light as the parent of a student. I thought that I knew how important Carroll had been in influencing my development in a positive way – enough that it was extremely important to me as a parent for my daughter to experience the same benefits. Experiencing the impact of the school and community from a parent’s perspective was truly amazing. Because my daughter Emma Mihlbachler '18 was involved in completely different aspects of the Carroll community as part of the music program, I was able to see a whole new side of what Carroll has to offer. I was also able to experience again the value of providing service to others as the food mom for the band. These years were absolutely some of the best I have spent, perhaps even better than when I was there as a student! Seeing the absolutely tireless effort that the parents, administration, band directors, and other members of the Carroll community put into the students from a parent's perspective really confirmed everything that I had experienced as a student and more. Now watching her as a successful college student in the nursing program at Case Western Reserve University, I am even more amazed at what a Carroll High School education provides its students.

I promise this isn’t a click-bait headline. This is my attempt not to bury the lead. You see, I fail every single day. From my freshman year at Carroll High School (and definitely before) and through more than 20 years since leaving (and definitely in the future), my life has consisted of a series of micro-failures, and there was a time I feared that failure.

There’s very little I’m afraid of. Heights don’t bother me. I think spiders get a bad rap. I’m more comfortable flying on a plane than I am driving to the grocery store. Slasher films, zombies, running alone through Chicago – they all provide an adrenaline rush. But after I graduated from Carroll High School, I was afraid of failure. Was I ready? Could I succeed? Will I remember the definition of ‘health’ (Yes, Mrs. Lane, I remember it’s ‘optimal personal fitness for full, fruitful, creative and spiritual living)? These same concerns have tagged along with me as I’ve worked as a marketing turn-around expert for technology and media/entertainment companies.
But my ability to embrace, learn from, and build on my failures are a result of my time at Carroll.

Fail together, in public, with confidence

If you were in English class with Miss Wourms or a Latin class with Sister Mary Alice Stein, you can probably recall the repeated rework of diagramming sentences or conjugating Latin verbs. I can remember the frustrations of Calculus and trying to follow along with Shakespeare but what stands out the most were the teachers who encouraged us to own our failures while learning these concepts. We shared them as a class, discussed the challenges, and then broke down why they occurred so we could build on those learnings. This taught me throughout my career how to develop an environment that reinforces resiliency, risk-taking, perseverance, and adaptation. I learned how to focus on solutions instead of blame and how to respond to failure.

Fail fast, and incrementally, in order to create

In business we preach, “fail and fail fast” or “create an environment where employees have the freedom to fail”. Even if the company culture truly supports that, failure doesn’t happen often. Companies hire experienced employees who have proven success in their field. Failure is rare. However, when you’re in school and learning, almost everything you first attempt fails. I believe this is why so many professionals become averse to learning. At Carroll, I failed over and over and over and over again. In my academics, athletics, and social structure, I was pushed so incredibly far outside of my comfort zone. I learned to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and that has served me well. It has taught me that micro-failures are necessary if I’m going to continue to learn and develop.

Fail free of judgment

While at Carroll, I was surrounded by teachers and coaches that encouraged authenticity. I was taught the importance of transparency, compassion, commitment, ethics, and setting the tone. I was never fearful – well, except when walking to the lunch room and my shirttail was untucked. These teachings have allowed me to foster a culture in my teams that embraces failure, free of fear. By developing a culture of authenticity, I’ve found that I can improve manager-employee relations, respond to change, and set goals. And when you fail free of judgment, you can begin to replace blame with curiosity. Relationships are better and more interesting when working together and building. It’s too easy just to fight, but relationships with tension and conflict make life interesting because not all tension and conflict is bad. Competing and differing ideas are great things.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to spend the better part of seventeen years working for innovative companies and iconic brands like The Second City and Oracle. I’ve worked with immense talents that push the level of creativity and challenges common convention. I’ve also learned to view everyone as a person with a special story to tell, to foster talent, and to teach. All of these learnings and all of my success can absolutely be attributed to my time at Carroll High School. But the most important lesson is to follow the fear and do what scares me the most. Carroll has taught me that if it’s uncomfortable, do it more.