For Immediate Release
Contact: Kim Schmelz, Foundation Director
Phone: 608.822.2379
Mail: 1800 Bronson Blvd., Fennimore, WI 53809
Date of Release: February 26, 2020
Southwest Tech’s first nursing assistant graduate shares her story
Fennimore -
Marian Rossing was one of the 22 women who completed the very first Nursing Assistants training course at Southwest Wisconsin Technical College in 1968. Rossing was 36 years old at the time, had five children and worked full-time with her husband at their business, Rossing Construction. “I always wanted to be a nurse,” said Rossing. “As a child I had doctored up my teddy bear and had a passion for caring for others.”
The newspaper article that Rossing kept in her scrapbook stated that the Nursing Assistants course was organized in response to the needs of the Lancaster Memorial Hospital and the Good Samaritan Home of Fennimore. The course was conducted under the joint auspices of the school and the hospital with the cooperation of Earl Strub, hospital administrator. The class was held in Lancaster, not on the Southwest Tech campus, like many of the college’s courses at the time that were held in the city of Fennimore and surrounding communities, as the school was being built.
The training consisted of 100 hours of instruction with 30 of these hours in clinical experience. Rossing stressed how important those hours of instruction were to ensure that students were confident in their abilities when working with patients. Teaching the course and supervising the clinical phase of instruction were Dorothy Hofstetter, director of nurses for Lancaster Memorial Hospital, and Dorothy Johnson, R.N. “Emphasis on the ability to recognize symptoms that require the attention of a registered nurse, to develop good judgement, to practice correct ethics, and to maintain high standards are stressed,” said Hofstetter.
Several years after graduating from the program, Rossing went to work for the Good Samaritan Home of Fennimore. “I started out at $3.25 per hour and when I resigned nine years later I was making $4.75,” she said. Rossing would work a full day at her husband’s business then work the 3 – 9 p.m. shift at the nursing home and then go home and check on her children.
“It was kind of special to work with the older people in the nursing home,” said Rossing. “They really liked me visiting with them and I enjoyed caring for them.”
“She was such a role model for me and my sister,” Rossing’s daughter, Sheri said. We were still in the time where a lot of mothers didn’t work outside of the home. She showed us what was possible and that we could have our own careers.”
Marian, 87, and her husband Garald, 90, live outside of Fennimore and over the years have had 70 Southwest Tech students rent an apartment style room in the basement from them. And while Marian is no longer working, she still enjoys visiting nursing home residents. She has a group of friends that travel to area nursing homes, line dancing for residents.
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Photo caption: Marian Rossing holding her certificate of completion from Southwest Wisconsin Vocation Technical Schoosl for the Nursing Assistant course