A square key dangles from a belt buckle on Fred Reagan’s blue jeans, slightly separated from the rest of his crowded keychain. The key has four letters on it: GGMK, an acronym Reagan says stands for “Great Granddaddy Master Key.”
Although Reagan, 64, is not a great-grandfather in the literal sense, it is a fitting characterization of the role he plays within the Merrimack Valley School District: For almost three decades, the gum-chewing, coffee-drinking, plaid-shirt-wearing man has served as the district’s facilities director.
Reagan’s master key — the only one that exists — opens roughly 400 doors in eight schools and multiple other buildings across Penacook, Boscawen, Loudon, Salisbury and Webster. Since 1997, Reagan has been responsible for all of them.
Earlier this fall, Reagan was named the inaugural Facilities Director of the Year by the New Hampshire School Administrators Association. He is set to retire at the end of this school year.
Those who work with him say the award is a testament to Reagan’s single-minded mantra — “For the kids!”— and to the fact that he possesses as broad a range of skills as anyone in the district.
“He’s all about the kids, and whatever needs to get done to make sure that the buildings and the grounds and everything are as safe as possible for the kids, that’s what Fred does,” said human resources director Kathleen Boucher, one Reagan’s longest-serving colleagues. “That’s Fred in a nutshell.”
He is known both for his technical acumen and for his long-range planning, emergency preparedness and financial background; for both his disarming sense of humor and his encyclopedic knowledge of Merrimack Valley, spanning all the way back to his days as a Summer Street School student in the 1970s.
“Not only can he get down to figure out what’s wrong with the boiler and have a general sense of that,” but he also draws upon “a 30,000-foot view of things,” Superintendent Randy Wormald said.
That is particularly apt because, in an important respect, a facilities director is like an air traffic controller. The better one is at both jobs, the more invisible their work becomes. Crises are averted, money is saved and the school community is none the wiser.
Reagan is proud of the fact that in his almost 29 years — some 5,000 school days — none of the schools in the district have failed to open due to a lack of heat or electricity. (Known for both his memory and honesty, he did note that Webster Elementary closed for one day in 2001 during the kindergarten addition due to an uncovered hole in the roof.)
Bill Heinz, a Boscawen resident and longtime school district watchdog, believes Reagan has saved taxpayers significant money over the years by jumping on creative funding opportunities, dutifully maintaining the district’s buildings and creating a woodchip plant, which had accounted for $600,000 in energy savings as of 2018.
“He is worth his weight in gold,” Heinz said.
While some of Reagan’s other cost savings are impossible to quantify, his legacy will be reflected in very visible and lasting ways, too. Reagan presided over all of the district’s capital projects during his tenure, including the construction of Penacook Elementary School at the turn of the century and major renovations to the high school and various other buildings in 2006 and 2007.
He is most proud of the latter project, a $22 million undertaking for which he served as the project manager.
“If something had gone wrong, it would have come down on me, but you can’t think about that,” Reagan said. “You do what’s best for the district, you have good planning, you have other administrators that are helping you plan by advocating for what they’d like their school to have. The community has been very supportive over the years.”
Reagan has spent nearly his entire life enmeshed in that community. In 1968, when he was seven years old, he and his three siblings moved from Concord to Penacook and later settled in Salisbury. His tour through the Merrimack Valley School District featured stops at the former Summer Street and Washington Street Schools and the middle and high school.
After graduating in 1979, Reagan worked in construction and in the restaurant industry. He met his wife, Andrea, in 1989, while they both worked at the Archway Restaurant in Concord, she as a waitress and he as a bartender.
Andrea started working for the school district in 1991 and Fred followed two years later, beginning as a custodian. After a few years working on the maintenance team, he was promoted to lead it.
In that role, he supervises a team of roughly 30 people. He is responsible not just for maintenance projects, but for the custodial staff and groundskeepers. He chips in on jobs outside of his official duties too, such as manning the microphone at school board meetings.
Walk around a school building with Reagan and it will feel like every single staff member in the district knows him.
“He’s a lot of fun, has a great sense of humor, and he tells a story like nobody you’ve ever heard,” said Boucher, whose office is across the hall from his.
Those relationships extend outside the district, too, to fire marshals, road agents, contractors and engineers. Those connections are undoubtedly genuine, but they also provide practical benefits for the district. On potential snow days, for example, Reagan is up at 4 a.m. texting the road agents for the district’s towns to get status reports on weather conditions.
“They’ll give him the real scoop and be honest with him, and then he reports back,” said Wormald, who makes the ultimate call based in part on the information Reagan gathers.
In a job that can sometimes draw the ire of taxpayers, particularly when major projects are proposed, Reagan has earned the grudging respect of even the most fiscally conservative of residents. Sometimes at the annual meeting, he will say, “If I’ve ever lied to you, please stand up.” No one ever has.
“We pride ourselves in this district on being frugal, and I think he is frugal himself and it reflects on his work,” Heinz said. “He can oftentimes squeeze a nickel and make a dime out of it.”
That is not to say Reagan never faces criticism. Some in recent years have questioned the lack of competitive bid processes for certain projects, for example.
“Right now, there’s a contingent of Loudon voices that want us to be more transparent and make sure we get the best bang for their buck,” Reagan said. “And that’s certainly understandable. They’re not wrong.”
This is not the first time Reagan has announced his intention to retire. Three years ago, Reagan had already submitted a notice of resignation when Wormald was named superintendent. The day after getting his new job, Wormald went into Reagan’s office and asked him to stay.
“That kind of shocked me,” Reagan said. “Not that he wanted me to stay, but I was this close to retiring.”
Now, both Wormald and Reagan are set to retire together this June. The loss of Reagan will be “huge” for the district, Wormald said.
In his final months, on top of potentially leading the first stages of the Washington Street School renovation and assiduously maintaining district facilities as he has done for the past three decades, Reagan has one final — likely unattainable — goal surrounding the school’s colors.
“I bleed white and blue,” he said, “although for years, I’ve wanted to get maroon in there.”