By Megan Alley
Sun Reporter
Final orders are being taken for New Richmond Schools Education Foundation’s alumni directory, the first of its kind for the school district.
The project, which is years in the making, is being led by Ursula Thomas Miller, executive director for the foundation.
Miller, along with some two dozen dedicated volunteers, combed through microfiche and other historical documents to track down the contact information for New Richmond High School graduates; the directory focuses on the 1930s to present day.
“Many years and volunteers went into the making of the database and directory from scratch; lots of manual data entry,” Miller wrote in an email.
While the directory itself is an interesting and useful reference book — more than 10,000 alumni are included, with the oldest living alumni being 106 years old, and alumni living in every state but for North Dakota — it is also part of NRSEF’s bigger fundraising strategy, Miller explained.
“[The alumni directory] will be the basis of our constituent database that we will use for a major fundraising campaign toward an endowment, given all the financial challenges the district faces without power plant money,” Miller wrote in an email.
Talks of the directory got underway in 2011, and the project really took off in 2013 and 2014.
“I’m both excited and exhausted that this part of the project is finished,” Miller said in a phone interview. She, along with the other volunteers, worked many nights and weekends to finish the project.
In fact, a group of volunteers met each Wednesday evening to input data, sometimes having to use magnifying glasses and interpreting archaic address markings to record useful information.
“It was a haul,” Miller explained.
Orders for the directory are being collected until Sept. 9, and the books are expected to be delivered by the end of the year.
NRSEF is working with a professional publishing company — Publishing Concepts Inc., a Texas-based publisher — to print the directory at no cost to the foundation for the initial run.
It will likely be at least 10 years before another directory is published.
Those looking to purchase a directory should email nrsef@nrschools.org, or call the foundation’s office line at 513-553-2616, ext. 12101.
A package with digital and hardbound copies costs $109, while a package with digital and softbound copies costs $89. Orders for just a hardbound copy cost $89, orders for just a softbound copy cost $69, and orders for just a digital copy also cost $89.
Each alumni’s information is as extensive as was available, including name, address, cell phone numbers, profession and names of family members.
For those concerned about security, Miller was quick to note that the publishing company has a process by which they include decoy information to make sure that third-party marketers are not using the contacts listed in the directory.
Now that the alumni directory project is finished, NRSEF plans to pursue funding for database software, which can cost about $5,000 per year.
The foundation is also planning to launch a full website.
For now, you can learn more about NRSEF by visiting the webpage.
Interesting bits about the New Richmond Schools Education Foundation’s alumni directory:
— The directory is a little more than 200 pages.
— The listings of alumni is 190 pages. There is also a narrative portion, another 15 pages long.
— New Richmond High School graduated its first class in 1878 with 11 students.
— Names from the very early decades of the 1880s to 1920 will be included.