ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
About 20 years ago, Seward County started a local office for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Women Infants and Children (WIC) program at the Seward County Health Department.
At that time, Tiffani Krause was chosen to head up that office as director. As of Sept. 29, she is no longer in that position, as she has chosen to retire.
Prior to and while serving as WIC director, Krause has had extra education in breastfeeding, and she got her nursing degree in 1987 at Seward County Community College.
She brought with her a wealth of experience in the health care field, including two years as a nurse’s aide, as well as a licensed practical nurse and registered nurse, at Liberal Good Samaritan Society.
Krause’s medical experience likewise includes being a director of nurses in Syracuse and some time in Dodge City’s health care industry. Following that time, she came back to Liberal to work in the emergency room and intensive care unit at Southwest Medical Center.
While she never received her bachelor of science in nursing, Krause does have extra college credits, as well as administrative teachings through SCCC.
“I got my designated breastfeeding educator through USDA,” she said. “It was mandated if you were the director of a program. That was about five, six years ago.”
Now, Tammie Thompson has taken the helm of the local WIC program as its newest director. Like Krause, Thompson also brings much experience to the job, having served as an LPN on the obstetrics floor at SWMC as she finished her RN education in 2010 from SCCC.
Thompson would later became the OB nurse manager at the hospital, a position she would hold for five years, and after deciding she needed a change of pace, she came to WIC, where she has been for two and a half years.
Thompson likewise is a licensed International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. She said her interest in health care came from an experience with an illness and being treated in a hospital.
“I was having trouble breathing and being scared, and I remember how that nurse affected me,” she said. “It guided me to making that decision.”
Krause’s path to health care was somewhat different.
“I was going through an Amarillo, Texas, college and Clarendon College as a social worker,” she said. “I was going to be a social worker. My grandmother, who was very ill, was always on dialysis and a very bad diabetic, and she started talking to me about nursing, and I switched careers.”
Since then, Krause said she has loved nursing.
“Anybody who goes into nursing shouldn’t get burnt out,” she said. “If they’re burnt out, they need to change within nursing. There are so many venues of nursing where you can go. You can go into administration. You can go into emergency medicine. You can go into public health. Public health has been my favorite.”
Krause said working at WIC for the past 20 years has shown her how wonderful public health is.
“I believe in public health,” she said. “WIC has been absolutely life-changing for me. I’ve met so many wonderful people, and I’ve gotten to know people all over the United States through WIC. Most WIC employees have their families in their hearts. They want families to be healthy. They want to get them what they need to be a positive family, to be healthy families, and we give a lot of referrals to the community.”
Krause said WIC also works in several aspects of the community, not just as food security, but with doctors, nurses and hospitals among others.
“We work with the case workers,” she said. “We refer into Russell Child Development Center. We have a list of 30 different referrals we can make within the community.”
Knowing those referrals, Krause said, is vital to serve the families in the WIC program.
“You become a friend to these families,” she said. “You see them every three months from the time they’re pregnant to the time their children are 5.”
Being a longtime WIC director, Krause said she now sees many of the children at the time she started now becoming moms.
“It’s a cool thing to see those, and it makes you feel good that they have that trust in you as well,” she said. “When they come in here, they know they can ask anything. We always tell them. Anything you give me and tell me is very confidential. We’re here to help you and your family. We’re not here to judge.”
Thompson said nursing was a second career for her.
“My first degree was in employee management,” she said. “Going from agriculture to nursing was a pretty big shift.”
The local WIC program has recently had funding issues, and SCHD Director Brie Greeson recently came before the Seward County Commission requesting funding from the county’s Sales Tax Health Initiative Fund to help WIC through the final quarter of Fiscal Year 2025, which ended Sept. 30, and the first quarter of FY 2026, which started Oct. 1.
While the lack of funding did play a part in her decision to retire, Krause said there were other factors as well. In addition to Krause’s longevity as director, she has had several longtime coworkers at WIC.
Krause said cutting staff would have been a hard decision to make, but she emphasized this was not her main reason for retirement.
“I’m going to focus on my family and my farm,” she said. “There’s been a lot of changes in the farm and everything that has to happen in a farm. I’m going to be helping my husband more on the farm.”
Krause said Thompson was hired with the intent of taking over the director position at WIC.
“Tammie knew she was going to get my position, maybe not quite this soon,” she said. “My original date was going to be a year from now, but I retired a year early. The circumstances for me are good, and I can retire with full benefits. I was not asked to retire. It was within my judgment that it was best for everybody involved if I retired a little early.”
As for Thompson, she said she simply aims to keep the WIC program running smoothly and build on what Krause has established to keep serving families and doing what is best for clients.
Krause said WIC looks to be fully funded at this time.
“When you’re working with federal programs and the politics that go with that, there’s always ups and downs, and we still don’t know how much,” she said. “We have permission from the county if we need to have funds for them, but we don’t know 100 percent how much funds we will actually need yet.”
Krause said she has many wonderful memories from working at WIC.
“We have had absolutely so much fun with our travels to other places for education, getting to know my staff,” she said. “Even Tammie and I have had lots of laughs. WIC is a very wonderful place to work. Its stress level comes and goes, and we’re not dealing with life and death.”
One thing Krause liked about her job was the flexibility she had with her schedule.
“If I had something going on with my family, I can take off and reschedule and get everybody seen,” she said. “WIC is a very family-oriented job, and we focus on each others’ families as well as other families. I’ve always had time for my family as well as other families.”
Krause said WIC not only impacts the clients it serves, but it also provides a yearly impact of more than $1 million to the Liberal community just from vendors.
“That doesn’t include how much they spend when they go to those stores other just WIC dollars, and we employee six people here as well with full-time benefits,” she said. “Those are very important things WIC brings to the table. We also make sure we refer to those 30 different agencies we have and we work with hand in hand, and we try not to double up services as well.”
With 20 years of work put into WIC, Krause said leaving the office has been a bittersweet experience.
“It’s emotional for me,” she said. “I try not to cry. I love my job.”
With WIC’s importance to the community, Krause she has felt very supported in her role, including the commission’s hard decision to keep the agency in place.
“They know how important WIC is,” she said. “I feel good that the commissioners are behind us. They’re making tough decisions with budgets right now. We’ve been down this road a couple of times where we’ve had to go and say we don’t know if we’re going to get funding. This is the first time in 20 years the state has said go to your commissioners and tell them you’re going to need funding.”
With changes being made in WIC at the state and federal level, Krause said though those changes are hard to see, she is hoping they are the correct changes.
“In the state WIC office, there’s only five or six years’ seniority,” she said. “When I came into WIC, the state came out and trained us, and it was such a wonderful with state WIC. I’ve always felt very comfortable. We’ve had a very open relationship with the state WIC.”
In Thompson, Krause said she knows WIC will be in good hands.
“I am handing it over to somebody I know is going to do a wonderful job,” she said. “Tammie and I have gotten to know each other very well in the last couple years, and she’s going to do amazing work. I look forward to seeing WIC grow.”
Krause said she and Thompson have been planning the transition for two years, and both, along with Greeson, have been heavily involved in the communication process of that transition.
“We did a little succession planning, and the county allowed us to do that,” Krause said. “I’m so happy they did that. It has been positive, and me leaving is not a negative. It’s a positive for me.”
With all of this in mind, Krause’s advice to Thompson is simple.
“Just do you,” she said. “She knows how to manage. She’s managed an OB floor. She knows how to manage people very well. She knows the business. She’s a breastfeeding educator. She’s got more stuff behind her than I have, and I just feel she is the perfect person for the job. I’m handing my baby over, and she’s going to do good with it.”
Thompson said she is quite ready to take on her new job as WIC director.
“Tiffani’s done a great job of showing me stuff I don’t know, how to resource it out,” she said. “WIC is very policy driven, and things are done at the same time every year. She’s done a great job in leading me in what needs to be done.”
