By Paige Nash
It is National Public Safety Telecommunicators’ Week (NPSTW), a week-long celebration that takes place annually during the second week of April to honor and show appreciation to the telecommunications personnel across the nation.
Telecommunicators serve citizens across the country working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to ensure the safety of the public, much like the personnel who serve Webster Parish.
There are 4 telecommunication offices in the parish including Springhill Police Department, Webster Parish Sheriff’s Office, Minden Police Department and Webster Parish E-911 at the courthouse.
“We are going to be doing games, prizes and eating good food all week. If you have an opportunity, come to a dispatch center, walk in and poke your head in and tell them what a great job they are doing,” said Webster Parish E-911 Communications Executive Director Angie Champman. “There is not one public safety agency in this parish that can do what they do without the people under the headsets and on the phones. They work 24/7/365 to help take care of their parish too and this is a week that we can celebrate them.”
NPSTW began in 1981 in a rather interesting way.
According to National Today, this was originally a local initiative started by Patricia Anderson of Contra Costa Country in California. The sheriff at the time, Richard Rainey, decided to treat his administrative staff to lunch one day to show his appreciation for all their hard work.
His administration usually answered the calls that came in during business hours and forwarded them to dispatch after hours, but on this day they all decided to push their calls to dispatch at 11 a.m. and left for lunch.
It did not take long before the dispatchers were bombarded with calls. The supervisor attempted to call the admin department to see what was happening, only to have that phone call routed back to him. He decided to send an employee to the office to check in, just for them to find the entire building completely vacant.
At 1 p.m. the staff returned and resumed their usual day to day activities, re-routing the phone lines back to the sheriff’s office. Soon after that long time dispatcher, Patricia Anderson, walked over to the administration department and gave the sheriff an earful, explaining what the dispatchers had just been through over the last two hours while they were out feasting.
In an effort to make peace, Sheriff Rainey walked into the dispatch department an hour later with a giant cake that said, “Happy Dispatcher Week” and the rest is history.
NPSTW was officially declared and signed into proclamation by President Bill Clinton in 1991 and is now globally celebrated once a year.