Growth meaningful to Busch as she steps down at Area 30

After serving as its executive director for the last 14 years, Lora Busch will be leaving Area 30 Career Center. However, she will not retire fully from career and technical education, and hopes a positive climate she has worked to foster at Area 30 is maintained in the future.

Banner Graphic/BRAND SELVIA

After serving as its executive director for the past 14 years and being involved with teaching and administration as a whole nearly the last three decades, Lora Busch is stepping away from being a mentor and leader at Area 30 Career Center. In doing so, she is hopeful it will maintain a welcoming environment focused on learning and student success.

Having accepted Busch’s resignation in March, Area 30’s interlocal board of directors tapped current Asst. Director Chad Nunley last week to succeed her in the position.

A native of Morgantown and raised on a farm, Busch graduated from Indian Creek High School in 1978 and went on to study horticulture education at Purdue University. After graduating from there in 1983, she then managed Country Harmony Garden Center on the west side of Indianapolis.

“I loved that job; I’d probably still be there,” Busch said about the garden center. But when developers came in and bought the property, she went off and ran her own landscaping business for six years, in which her employees were almost all women and their general specialty was perennial gardens.

Later in 1995, Busch found an ad for starting a landscaping class in a partnership between Area 30 – which was based at the old Miller School at this time – and part-time teaching in Cloverdale High School’s agriculture department. She applied and was hired, going full time at Area 30 a year later once the landscaping class had enough students for both a morning and an afternoon session.

Besides getting to work with her students on projects during the summers, the highlights of teaching the class were the many trips funded by the money they earned. During seven of these eight years, they traveled from the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C., to Disney World for a behind-the-scenes tour of its horticulture program, and from visiting Colorado to touring gardens overseas in England.

With Area 30 settled into the current building, Busch became its assistant director in 2003 when Mike Walton came in as the executive. For her, making the transition from teaching to administration meant taking on a more “overarching” role being responsible for staff as well as students.

“The thing I learned the most was to step away as the fellow teacher, and became the teacher-cheerleader, the teacher-mentor,” Busch said. “Finding the best in your teachers and your staff is one of the biggest pleasures, highlighting those successes and having our teachers share those with our fellow staff members and making sure we share that goodness across the building.”

There were about 150 students in eight programs at Area 30 in 1995. Growth was necessary to Busch when she finally became the executive director in 2008, while Nunley became assistant director after teaching previously. Now there can be around 365 students spread out in 18 programs.

She emphasized that this expansion has come about from constantly determining if career areas are high-wage/high-demand, whether students will enroll in programs and if they are fiscally feasible to offer.

For Busch, the programs are motivators which can encourage a love of learning for students. As such, a strongpoint is exploration of careers while still wanting to promote different aspects of education. The greatest “success stories” have been Area 30’s early college program, besides providing programs with industry credentialing.

“I think that what we must do is recognize that all classes are not for all students,” Busch said. “I know that our programs are respected by our guidance counselors and our principals and our superintendents. I think what we have done is become more of a traditional track as well, that kids who come here are also those same kids who might study AP classes back at the high school.”

As for meeting challenges with finances, local politics or curriculum standards, Busch said administrators can either be distracted by them, or put them on the business side of education and make the focus mainly on students’ success. This is contingent with Area 30 being where they, teachers and staff want to be.

With hiring local professionals such as Greencastle Police Capt. Charles Inman, Greencastle firefighter James Shaw – who himself went through the law enforcement program – and auto collision instructor and former Area 30 student Rob Worman, being community-oriented is an innate effect.

Then again, Busch would say that her focus has always been on people. This is what she will miss the most as she steps away from Area 30. “Your education can become your lifelong happiness if you find what you love,” she provided as her statement about the value of learning at a place like Area 30.

“I will always be attached to our school, because I love it,” Busch said getting choked up. “I believe in it, and it’s become a huge part of me.”

After working with Nunley and finding dedicated teachers, Busch hopes the positive and welcoming climate she has sought to foster with students will endure. This will be making sure they are always greeted and seen off, and for them to know they are cared for as learners and as people.

“It’s been a pleasure working in Putnam County for the past 27 years,” Busch said alluding to support from the community, as well as from those who have served on the Area 30 Board. “I’ve loved every minute of it.”

Busch will not be entirely removed from career and technical education, though. While Nunley will be taking over at Area 30 in July, she is to become the executive director of the Indiana Association of Career & Technical Education Districts, which represents CTE centers across the state.