Pauline Schneider said it was just the right time. As someone who now has aging parents back home in Canada, it was time to move back.
After 17 years, Schneider announced Friday that she is leaving her post as executive director of the Los Alamos Retired and Senior Organization. Her last day will be sometime in June.
As she sat at her desk in her office at the Betty Ehart Center in Los Alamos, she said she was glad for the help she was able to give to two retirement centers her organization oversees and the people in them.
The ironic thing is that when she first started working with seniors in Los Alamos, those Los Alamos seniors first came to her when she was working in Santa Fe. Schneider was working at a Santa Fe retirement organization, then named
Rosemont, when the facility opened its doors to the seniors evacuating from Los Alamos during the 2000 Cerro Grande fire.
When she made the move to the Los Alamos Retired and Senior Organization in 2001 she was already involved in helping those same seniors rebuild their lives by helping the volunteers at the two senior centers try to recover computer equipment and other things the seniors lost to the fire.
“Our volunteers were amazing,” Schneider said. “Just watching them interact with the seniors was amazing.”