Laire retires as dispatcher

Montgomery County’s 911 supervisor Jackie Laire recently celebrated her retirement from dispatching.
Laire officially retired from the position on May 15, after 48 years of service with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and the Red Oak Police Department. Laire shared what led her to come and work for the sheriff’s office all those years ago.  
“When my husband and I first moved to town, my husband was a firefighter, and I started working for the Red Oak Police Department around 1975, before later transitioning to dispatcher.  When I first started, Red Oak Police had 24 hour dispatchers, but the sheriff’s office did not. A couple of year’s later, then-Sheriff Dick Harrell was able to get board approval for 24-hour dispatchers at the sheriff’s office. He had approached me and asked if I’d consider leaving the police department and serving as a sheriff’s office dispatcher, and so I did. I started in September of 1977,” Laire said.
Initially, the dispatchers were separated between the police department and sheriff’s office.. Later, in the early 1990s, the county dispatch center expanded into basic 911 services and combined into one center.
“At the start, basic 911 allowed phone companies to route a 10-digit number to the sheriff’s office. Around 1997, we moved to the enhanced 911 system. After that, there was more talk about one dispatch center, and we finally went to one center in November of 2001,” stated Laire.
Laire admitted that in the early goings of her dispatch career, she wasn’t expecting it to be long-term, nor did she expect the changes that would come with the job over the years.
“I would never have thought on the day I walked into the police station that I’d eventually move into dispatch and retire from doing it all these years later, but once I got it in my blood, I’ve never had any desire to do anything else but this. Every day, there’s something different,” commented Laire. “I was the first hire Sheriff Harrell made, and he asked for my input on the hiring of the other three dispatchers at that time. Also, we were working as jailers, and did both duties. Throughout the years, we’ve added 24-hour, 365 day corrections officers to the staff.
As the years have gone by, Laire said there have been a number of improvements that have made her role much more efficient, the implementation of 911 being the best thing that could have happened.
“It really helped law enforcement and first responders by doing away with rural route addresses. When rural routes were in place and we got a call, the rural route address tells us nothing, so we’d have to dispatch the address as being two miles west of Red Oak, or one mile north of Red Oak as an example. When 911 came in, every rural route was given a four digit address with a main street or an avenue, and now we can get our responders a pinpoint address. They know exactly where to go because they know our addressing scheme for the county,” advised Laire.
Another vast improvement, Laire said, has been the equipment upgrades she’s seen over the years.
“I never would have thought there would be emails, or a computerized aided dispatching system. Whenever a call comes in, it goes into our call-taking screen, and we fill it out and log it as our caller is giving us the information, and dispatch it out to our units, and it automatically logs the times that everything is being done, which is much more accurate than the way it was, where we wrote it down on a sheet of paper,” Laire said.
The last major improvement, according to Laire, happened when the county transitioned from its UHF radio system to the new radio system.
“It served it’s purpose, and we did as much as we could do with the UHF system to have coverage all over the county, but it was poor in certain areas, and we would have trouble hearing our first responders and vice-versa. Now we’re on the state system, and it’s great. We have good coverage, we can hear each other, and we have operability with other counties,” Laire stated.
Throughout her career as a dispatcher, Laire said the most rewarding aspect is a positive resolution to an emergency call.
“Whenever you take a call, and handle it to the best of your abilities, when the call resolves in a positive manner, I think that has to be about the best feeling you can have as a dispatcher. We are the first responder. We’re taking the information and how we handle the information here helps out our emergency responder out there. It’s a rewarding feeling to take a call and know that you’ve helped someone. That’s what we’re about, and that’s what we’re here for,” Laire commented.
Now that she’s retired, Laire said she will enjoy more free time as well as spending more time with family and friends.