By Caleb Symons
THE KEENE SENTINEL
For Emilee Guyette, it started with food.
Interested in culinary arts growing up, the Marlow native got an after-school job in the dietary department at Langdon Place of Keene. Guyette quickly rose through the Arch Street nursing home’s kitchen to the rank of prep cook.
But her career plans diverged when, while working with the elderly residents, nursing care grabbed her attention.
After graduating from Keene High School in 2009, Guyette got certified as a licensed nursing assistant. Still a prep cook at the time, she also began picking up evening nursing shifts.
“I’ve always sort of had this variety. … I like switching it up.”
Now living in Sullivan, Guyette, 30, has made another change, leaving the world of assisted living eight years ago to work at the Cedarcrest Center for Children with Disabilities in Keene. Her commitment to nursing, and to public service, nonetheless remains.
“As long as I’m making a difference, I’m definitely satisfied with that,” she said. “No matter what role that is.”
While taking nursing classes at a couple local colleges, Guyette left Langdon Place for the former Bentley Commons assisted-living facility — now called American House — on Water Street in Keene. The work was rewarding, she said, but she grew tired of its second-shift hours.
Still, Guyette’s move to Cedarcrest in 2014 was rather inadvertent.
A friend who’d applied for a job with the Maple Avenue nonprofit, which provides education and health care for young people with complex medical and developmental needs, had listed Guyette as a reference. Upon learning in the reference check that Guyette was also an LNA, the hiring officer convinced her to come aboard, too.
Her first role was in Cedarcrest’s classrooms, where she was a nursing assistant and education aide to the children and young adults who live there. Guyette said she enjoyed creating a fun learning space, through activities and field trips, while also helping them progress toward their developmental goals. After working with seniors, she said, being surrounded by children was “refreshing.”
“They’ve got their lives ahead of them, and we want to help them in a different way to learn and thrive,” she said. “I love the elderly — I’ll always have a soft spot for them — but being around kids, it’s just fun.”
About a year after joining Cedarcrest, Guyette took what was meant to be a temporary position in the kitchen. It ended up being a permanent move, even as she continued working in the classroom. (Guyette preaches the importance of a healthy work-life balance but admits to not leading by example.)
Inspired by her educational work at Cedarcrest, she shifted gears in 2017, taking a paraprofessional job at James Faulkner Elementary School in Stoddard.
That role presented its own rhythms and challenges: Rather than working intimately with a single child, Guyette helped teach math and reading to more than 30 students from Grades 3-5. But the school was small enough that she could still connect with the kids, she said, often accompanying them throughout the day and enjoying their growth as students.
“I grew up in a small town, so that’s what I knew,” she said. “… I think of how it could be in other areas [where] you have certain kids for just a time frame of the day and then you move on. It was nice to be able to focus with that same group of kids throughout the entire day.”
Guyette answers the call for her community in other ways, too.
She and her husband, J.R., a chemist for the Westmoreland label manufacturer Polyonics, both work for Sullivan’s volunteer fire department — he as a captain, she as a firefighter. Guyette is also a licensed emergency medical responder.
The fire department responds to around 80 calls each year, she estimated, but her obligations go beyond those hours: As department treasurer, Guyette also runs its fundraising efforts. Still, she’s modest about the work and its importance.
“We’re a small department, but we all volunteer our time and make it work and try to help people whenever we can,” she said.
Guyette is now back at Cedarcrest, where she’d continued working odd jobs during her two years at Faulkner Elementary, having taken a full-time gig as environmental services manager in late 2019.
In that role, she heads an eight-person team responsible for housekeeping and laundry. To keep her LNA certification, Guyette also picks up nursing shifts when possible. Her impact extends even further.
“I can totally empathize with people here in different roles,” she said. “I’ve been in the kitchen, so if somebody in the kitchen is having a bad day, I know what that’s like. I’m always here to be able to jump in and help them, and I feel that’s just really who I am. I want to help people.”
Guyette’s resolve was tested right out of the gate with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was like OK, put your rollerblades on,” she said of the public-health crisis, having stepped into her new job only months earlier. Cedarcrest stopped receiving visitors, began regularly screening employees for symptoms and placed hand sanitizer and plexiglass dividers throughout the facility.
Guyette said explaining the pandemic and new protocols to the kids was difficult, especially for anyone with a hearing disability who could no longer rely on reading lips because staff were wearing masks. The organization tried to keep the daily routine as normal as possible, she said, including by setting up Zoom calls between kids and their parents while in-person visits were suspended.
“We tried not to make the pandemic a big deal to them,” she said. “We didn’t want them to be scared. We sort of lived that for them.”
Guyette, by all accounts, has also helped her colleagues through the pandemic, encouraging them to take time off to help reduce burnout.
In a statement to The Sentinel, Cedarcrest President and CEO Jay Hayston called Guyette “the ideal working manager” and said she’s “consistent, persistent, and wholly dedicated to the best interests of the children.”
“She has been a leader on COVID-19 precautions and has helped make sure all of our supplies and spaces were held to the highest standards for cleanliness and infection control,” Hayston said.
Her impact has gained even wider attention: Guyette was recently honored as a N.H. Healthcare Hero — one of seven people to earn the pandemic-inspired award for their work last year. The statewide recognition, given by an eponymous nonprofit backed by the N.H. Bureau of Economic Affairs, “was a very humbling surprise,” she said.
“I think we do a great job here of acknowledging each other and keeping each other going here at Cedarcrest,” she said. “But just that little bit of acknowledgment, that meant a lot.”
Guyette is nonetheless focused on the future. Now in her eighth year at Cedarcrest, she said making it to a decade would be very fulfilling. And even as her job description continues to expand, Guyette said she enjoys those new challenges — noting a particular interest in helping Cedarcrest avoid the staffing deficits that many health-care organizations have faced during the pandemic.
“I do look forward to growing a successful team and feeling that we have the coverage here that the kids really need and deserve,” she said.
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