RUPD’s Cormier Earns Service Award

RUPD’s Cormier Earns Service Award

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
Oct. 8, 1998

Valerie Cormier’s job title in the police department–traffic and parking program
coordinator–only begins to describe what she does and what she means to her colleagues.

"She is our absolute right hand, the glue that keeps us together," says
Mary Voswinkel, chief of police.

Cormier is a recent winner of the Distinguished Service Award, presented by the
human resources department on behalf of Rice to recognize staff members who perform
above and beyond their job descriptions to the benefit of the Rice community.
The award recipients, who must be nominated, each receive a Rice memento and a
gift certificate.

Cormier has been with the police department since 1990. She began as a data entry
clerk and advanced to the position of traffic and parking coordinator in ’93.
She is responsible for vehicle registration, parking and traffic citations and
the ticket appeal process. Cormier’s title is misleading since she also is responsible
for the department budget, Voswinkel says.

Cormier excels, in part, because of her caring and conscientious attitude.

"This is my first experience in the parking industry, and I’ve come to realize
that people take parking very seriously. It’s a very personal thing," Cormier
says.

Says Tom Bickers, assistant chief of police, "Her work ethic is one of the
best I’ve seen, and she makes my life easy. Val is a tough, tough worker.

"How she does such a balancing act is way beyond me," says Bickers,
referring to all of Cormier’s duties in the department and to her life as a single
mom. "Anyone who meets her 4-year-old son Sean can see that she’s done a
wonderful job raising him," he says.

Voswinkel finds Cormier to be painstakingly diligent in all her work and notes
that from ’93 to ’95, on top of her already crowded schedule, she also supervised
the shuttle bus system until a director of transportation was appointed. "It
required her to learn a whole new operation on her own, with no training or experience,"
says Voswinkel.

Cormier has supervised four updates in the parking and traffic record keeping
system and has customized other operations.

Before coming to Rice, Cormier was an accounts payable representative for an oil
company in Lafayette, La. She says her police department colleagues are "a
good group of people to work with. We work through a lot of pressure together,
which makes teamwork important." As a whole, she says, the Rice community
has been "easy to work with and very supportive."