Kern Fellows has been a pillar at Citrus for nearly 24 years. After years of hard work and satisfied coworkers, Fellows plans to retire.
Fellows is the head of the reprographics department and mailroom supervisor on campus, but his experience in the printing world lasted much longer than that.
Fellows started a print shop 48 years ago in his garage that eventually moved to a storefront. After 16 years of running his own business, Fellows decided he wanted to explore his options. Fellows came to Citrus College.
“I thought, ‘You know what? I really haven’t gotten a degree or anything,” Fellows said. “I just sort of learned this by trade. … While I was (at Citrus), I thought, ‘Let me keep an eye on the print shop.”
Fellows said while working on his degree, a part-time job opened up at the print shop, which worked appropriately for him.
“It was perfect. I could go to school here and work for hours and still be connected to the printing business,” Fellows said.
Fellows said he rose through the ranks and became the head of the reprographics department, where he used his position to go above and beyond in helping students, staff and faculty on campus. His good work ethic and customer service is greatly appreciated on campus.
Administrative assistant in the Citrus College Foundation, Briceyda Torres, said Fellows’ way of getting the job done isn’t just dependable, but is a good overall experience thanks to Fellows.
“There’s getting the job done, but there’s getting the job done gracefully, which he always manages to do,” she said. “He’s just so pleasant all the time.”
Torres was not the only administrator to voice her satisfaction with Fellows’ work. The director of the Citrus College Foundation, Christina Garcia, said she had many positive interactions with Fellows.
“I would definitely say he always got the job done,” Garcia said. “It’s in the nature of the job that things are last minute, but he would always get the job done and get it done very well.”
Even during the pandemic, Fellows said he kept things moving when everything seemed to be at a stop. Fellows noticed important items piling up in the mailroom.
“After we had shut down for a couple of months, mail was stacking up,” Fellows said. “I was noticing that there were some things that needed to be delivered.”
Fellows was tasked with coming up with a solution, so he did. Fellows organized a mail pick-up service where people could drive through the E6 parking lot and have their mail given to them. Drivers didn’t even have to get out of their cars.
“We started distributing mail once a week and it was safe,” Fellows said. “We had all the COVID regulations in place.”
Fellows printed all the signage for the mail pick-up system himself, giving staff and faculty the materials they needed to continue to work even in the strangest of circumstances. Of course his efforts were not ignored by the people he helped.
“During the pandemic, we had an unusually difficult working environment anyway, but he was right alongside everyone who was rolling their sleeves up and working,” Garcia said.
Fellows proudly made and continues to make improvements in the reprographics department. From redesigning the print shop’s layout to bringing in new technology, Fellows brings innovation to the reprographics department.
“We’re now able to produce products that we couldn’t do before to save the college a lot of money,” Fellows said. “… Pretty soon we’ll be getting new presses to update the technology, so we’ll continue offering new products quicker and just to do things that we couldn’t do before.”
Fellows’ colleagues recognize the improvements Fellows made in his department. Enterprise Services Manager Eric Magallon wrote about his pleasure in working with Fellows.
“As the Reprographics/Mailroom Supervisor, Kern has done an amazing job reorganizing reprographics and the mailroom including introducing new wide-format services, improved mail service, reorganized the layout of the print shop, expanded web ordering, and has created so many wonderful projects on campus,” Magallon wrote.
Garcia and the Citrus College Foundation also shared this appreciation.
“The Foundation is a high volume user of the reprographics services,” Garcia said. “He printed everything from flyers to invitations to specialized envelopes to some real unique gift items with the specialized printers they have.”
Fellows recently used some of his new specialized equipment in a task that he said would push the equipment to its limit. The task was to print a massive piece of new signage for the LED display on the western side of campus. It was a task he completed successfully, although the signage was so big it barely fit inside the print shop.
Fellows said he credits his success and popularity among staff and faculty on campus to his unique way of treating those he works with.
“We treat everybody with respect,” Fellows said. “We try to make it fun and happy. … People come in with their problems and they’re very stressed, but we try to relieve that stress, that’s my philosophy.”
To treat his customers with respect, Fellows said he sees the timely working conditions professors sometimes have to work with and does his best to be accommodating.
“I understand the stress and the timelines that teachers have, sometimes they don’t have a choice,”Fellows said. “Sometimes they give me a printing job in the morning and they need it in an hour.”
But Fellows doesn’t blame professors for their timely needs as “it’s just the way things happen,” Fellows said.
Fellows’ experiences as a student at Citrus inspired him to be kind and accommodating to his coworkers when they needed him.
“I can give (professors) the tools they need to promote learning, and for that it’s been satisfying to me because when I was a student at Citrus College and I did some things that were a little bit out of the box, the teachers asked me ‘How can we help you?’” Fellows said. “They never told me no or I couldn’t do it. They always asked me how we can help you be successful, and that’s the same attitude I have carried through all my work ethics here.”
Fellows also attributes his success to those who allowed him to do things out of the box – Coworkers like Magallon, Director of Fiscal Services Wade Ellis and Vice President of Finance and Administrative Services Claudette Dain.
“We’re working smarter, not harder, and that has to do with Eric and with Wade and with Claudette and with everyone in the administration team backing us and believing in us that we can do it,” Fellows said.
Fellows also attributes his popularity to his good relationship with his staff who he insists on giving the best customer service they can to the community.
“I treat my employees with respect and kindness,” Fellows said “I don’t micromanage them. I give them the tools that they need and the instruction that they need, and I expect high performance. … That’s what they give me and they have not disappointed me. And they treat the customers extremely nice. I insist on that.”
Now that Fellows plans on finally retiring, he says the thing he wants to do first is just to read a good book.
“I’m so tired of reading manuals and paperwork and emails and stuff like that, by the time I get to any pleasure reading, I just don’t even want to do it, so I’d like to do a little pleasure reading,” Fellows said.
Aside from pleasure reading, Fellows said it’s time to travel the country, which he looks forward to doing with his husband, who plans to retire alongside Fellows in August.
