Career Day – La Connor High School, La Connor, Washington
Co-authored by Kathie Brodie & Jennifer Schroeder
On December 4, 2009 Kathie Brodie, Freelance firm owner/reporter, and Jennifer Schroeder, Official from Skagit County, embarked on the first of many career day presentations representing the field of Court Reporting. This particular venue was La Conner High School at their Learn at Lunch program.. The La Conner School District’s unique approach is to have one career represented at a lunch hour rather than having many careers represented in an evening or weekend. That meant we had a captive audience! So we arrived, armed with a PowerPoint presentation and reporting equipment. Kathie started with the PowerPoint, giving the history of reporting, while Jennifer did a real time demonstration of it. The audience was very impressed! Then Jennifer described what enticed her into the field of reporting and gave a history of her career.
To give you the condensed version, during the time of the caveman there was no need to communicate verbally. The way he held his club was indication of his mood! Then came hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt which gave a history of life through drawings. The next big event was a desire to actually preserve a speech. In 63 BC Marcus Tullius Tiro used symbols and abbreviations he made up to remind himself of what was said so he could go back and write out the entire speech. Most of his abbreviations have been lost through the years, but the ampersand ( & ) still remains and he is credited with inventing it. So we have gone from grunts to drawings to abbreviations. Sounds a little like our current technological evolution, doesn’t it? Compare history with the advent of emails, attaching pictures to emails, and now texting (a clear example of abbreviations!), all coming out of our distant ancestors who had a desire to communicate. In 1180 AD a monk wrote a treatise on using different lengths and slant of lines to represent words and phrases, the precursor to shorthand. In 1772 the first reporters preserved the proceedings in England using quill pens and ink. Go forward to 1837 when Pittman shorthand used a combination of symbols to represent words, whereas prior to that each word had a different symbol (very cumbersome). So we have gone from hieroglyphic pictures representing words to length and position of lines representing sounds that could be combined to make words. Quite an ingenious distinction, and the forerunner of phonetic writing that we use today. In 1883 the first shorthand machine (instead of writing by hand) was invented, but it still allowed only one letter at a time to be typed. A high speed keyboard wasn’t invented until the 1940s. In the 1970s reporters would either type from their own notes or dictate their notes onto a reel-to-reel recorder and give it to a typist who would usually use carbon sets and onion skin paper and an IBM selectric typewriter to produce a transcript. Now we have computers and software and ftp sites and real-time writers. Who would have thought the caveman’s club could be the beginning of something so big and far-reaching!
Kathie Brodie actually learned about court reporting as a profession at a career night being held by the high school where she was a secretary in the 1970s. Her father was a lawyer in Olympia and her grandfather had been a reporter in Portland, Oregon where they just took “minutes” of the proceedings. Her father told her that she would always have a job as a court reporter, so that cemented her determination to go to school (starting by correspondence!) and become a reporter. With all the advent of technology, that feels like it was back in the age of a stone pad and a chisel, but she persevered and has been reporting for 35 years, sometimes embracing technology, sometimes avoiding it as long as possible, but still loving the profession that has allowed her to learn and earn her way through life.
Jennifer Schroeder decided on a career in court reporting early on. As a senior in high school, getting ready to graduate, everyone around her seemed to know where they were headed. But Jennifer had no idea of where she was going with her life, no plans, no direction, no goals, and little encouragement from her parents, who were getting ready to move the Seattle area. So she got a part-time job at a high-end retail clothing store and enrolled at Orange Coast Community College to pursue her AA degree.
Jennifer was lucky enough within a few months upon graduation to meet the woman who changed her path forever. Her name was Lorraine Champagne, and she was a client of Jennifer’s at the clothing store. Lorraine would purchased, so it seemed, whatever she wanted, spending lots of money in that store. Jennifer was intrigued and finally asked Lorraine what her profession was. Very matter of fact, Lorraine replied “I’m a court reporter”. Jennifer had no idea what in the world a court reporter was at the time, but at 18, that sounded pretty darn good.
So in the fall of 1989 she enrolled at South Coast Community College, going to school full time and working at night. She was on her way. By November of 1992 when Jennifer took the CA CSR, she was already married and she and her husband, Doug, were expecting their first son, Kyle. Having not passed the entire test the first time, she was off again to pass the second sequence of the test in San Francisco, now with her husband and three-month-old in tow. She passed the test and accepted a position immediately, taking her first deposition in June of 1993, something she will never forget on her little manual machine from school.
Then by 1995 Jennifer and her husband were expecting their second son, Grant. And by 1997 and four years of deposition experience under her belt, they decided it was time to move to a location better suitable to raising their two sons, Whidbey Island, WA. Jennifer was the breadwinner for the first three years while her husband took time off from his career to build their home. Had she not had this profession to rely on they would not have been able to do it. Once her husband went back to work Jennifer was able to start her own freelance business on Whidbey Island and juggle her schedule around her boys’ activities, making an income working part time that some of her friends were making working fulltime jobs. In addition to her own business, Jennifer also freelanced for several other agencies in the Puget Sound area until 2003 when she accepted a position at Skagit County Superior Court where she now works for four different judges reporting criminal and civil trials. She does realtime reporting daily for all the judges, who love it. When an attorney objects and read back is requested, her judge will read back for her. The judges are able to keep track of what was said by viewing their laptops. Jennifer enjoys her position for many reasons, the salary she receives, as well as the transcript income, which is an additional bonus, almost a separate income in itself, the benefits, and the family she has gained in her work environment.
Kathie and Jennifer had a wonderful time sharing the career of reporting with the audience, which was even more fun when they realized they had competed and come out ahead of the corn dogs for lunch day! The students asked great questions and were particularly fascinated to read (with the help of Jennifer’s real-time skills) what Kathie was saying as she said it. It was easy to keep the audience engaged and share with them the love we have of preserving the spoken word and the excitement of being exposed to different subjects and people and situations every day. We told them it was like going to school but never having to take a test (they like that!).
The goal is to reach at least 12 high schools or career nights during 2010. Kathie and Jennifer had a great time, the school really appreciated the presentation and sharing, and it was very rewarding to give back to our wonderful profession. We would urge each of you to share what we do and how we do it. For some of us, it has been a while since we “did it” and there have been many changes since the beginning, but isn’t that what makes it fun? If we want to have our profession continue and be viable, we all need to take some responsibility and get out there and just do it, share it, describe it, expose people to the possibility of a fascinating career. They won’t know if we don’t’ tell them, and if you want some control over where this profession is going, we need to make sure there are enough reporters entering school to keep schools open and the need for live reporters up front and personal to all the court administrators and attorneys. If there aren’t enough of us, they will have to go to video cameras and recording devices. Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Contact Roger Flygare or Kathie Brodie or Jennifer Schroeder and we will share with you anything you need to do a presentation in your area. It is up to each one of us to make this happen, to spread the word. You’ll be amazed at how much fun it can be to speak instead of sit quietly in the corner! Accept the challenge right now, today. Be a part of a grassroots effort to keep our profession viable.