Bill Wisniewski wears many hats in Ravenna. A 30-year resident, he is the former city service director, active in several nonprofit organizations and the director of operations of the Ravenna School District.
So when he was assigned the task of creating a new transportation center for the schools, he didn’t take the project or its $1.2 million price tag lightly. He thought he could do better. “I knew I would be overseeing everything from moving dirt to the ribbon cutting ceremony,” he says. “And I was prepared to do that.”
Aware that ODOT was about to level its 8-acre District 4 headquarters in the center of town, he approached them, concerned about the conspicuous hole and the $700,000 demolition cost that would be passed on to the citizens of Ravenna. Wisniewski recognized the potential: The facility and its garages were ideal for his buses.
But a meeting with ODOT was unproductive. “I knew I hadn’t made any headway,” Wisniewski recalls. “It was back to the drawing board.”
Then it happened. Wisniewski learned that a friend, Family & Community Services CEO Mark Frisone, had purchased the ODOT property for a dollar. Frisone had a vision that the complex could be transformed into a one-stop shop for area social service agencies.
Wisniewski had his own vision, the renovation of ODOT’s transportation facility into the school system’s bus garage. The plan would cut the estimated $1.2 million cost of constructing a new garage to $485,000 for the renovation. It would also fill a gap, providing bus transportation for Ravenna school students who use the social services agencies in the complex.
Their conversations became the Resources at Oakwood Campus, home to Family & Community Services, Big Brothers & Sisters of Portage County, Help Me Grow, the Portage County Senior Services Center and nearly a dozen other agencies.
“I don’t say this lightly, but this was a collaboration in the truest sense of the word,” Wisniewski says, explaining that his transportation facility has been instrumental to the complex’s success. “We are the folks who plow the streets, who transport the kids to school and now take them to social service agencies.”
That’s not his only source of pride. He loves its name. “It fits, doesn’t it? Mark and I and some others came up with it: The ROC.”