For Tara McMachen, director of operations at Mapleton Public Schools, the facilities management industry checked off everything she was interested in in a job: problem solving, technical depth and higher stakes.
“There was a real sense of expertise required to do that work well: understanding how systems needed to be configured for different buildings, diagnosing issues and knowing that what you were doing directly impacted life safety,” McMachen says. “That combination of technical challenge and real-world consequence made the work genuinely exciting to me early on.”
In her role at Mapleton Public Schools located in Colorado, she understands that facility decisions carry weight far beyond the moment they’re made. Something as simple as creating a maintenance plan can shape a building’s performance and the school district’s budget for decades to come. To her, these decisions not only affect people currently, but are setting up the people that come after them.
“Every day, the work my teams do — a properly running HVAC system, a clean classroom, a safe building — directly shapes whether a kid can focus, whether a teacher can teach and whether a campus feels welcoming,” McMachen says. “Most people never think about facilities until something breaks, but a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to ensure schools remain consistently operational. The other piece is the people doing that work every day. Maintenance and custodial teams are often the least visible staff in any organization, even though their work touches every student and teacher, every day. Investing in their training, giving them better tools and making sure leadership understands the impact of what they do has meant watching teams that were once overlooked earn real recognition — on staff surveys that historically don't reflect well on departments like ours. Seeing that shift, from invisible to valued, is what I find most rewarding about this profession.”
McMachen is one of eight facility professionals to be named to FacilitiesNet’s fifth annual Facility Champion award. The Champions play a critical role in ensuring the efficient and effective operation of buildings across the country, all while exhibiting strong leadership and pride within the industry.
“This is a challenging and deeply rewarding field. The work never sits still — new technology, shifting regulations and evolving code requirements mean you're never just maintaining what already exists; you're constantly adapting to what's next,” McMachen says. “Being recognized for navigating that complexity means a great deal to me. It also means something in a broader sense. Women still make up a relatively small share of facility managers in North America, even though the region leads globally on that front. Being named a Facility Champion, in a field where women are still finding their footing at every level, feels like recognition not just of the work itself, but of showing up and doing it well.”
Since 2018, Mapleton Public Schools has remodeled or rebuilt 10 schools – and McMachen has worked on nearly every single one. Projects of this scale touch nearly everything, she explains. HVAC systems need to be upgraded to improve air quality and comfort, infrastructure upgrades help reduce long-term maintenance burdens and design choices reflect where the districted is headed – not just where it’s been.
“Looking back, I'm proud that this work will outlast any single budget cycle or student attendance life cycle,” she says. “Students who walk through these doors ten or twenty years from now will still benefit from the decisions made today — and that's the kind of impact that makes this career genuinely rewarding.”
However, working with education facilities brings on its own set of challenges. The week teachers were set to return to schools, the district experienced a significant flood that impacted one of the campuses and its administration building. McMachen and her team immediately coordinated an action plan that involved pumping water out of the basement, clearing woodchips that had been washed across parking lots and sidewalks and getting vendors on site as soon as they could. She and her staff worked tirelessly through the night running fans and cleaning carpets to contain the damage and keep anything from spreading to other buildings. What made the difference, though, was holding all moving pieces under one point of accountability and creating a central point of communication.
“That first 24 hours set the tone, but the real test of leadership came in the weeks that followed,” she says. “I stepped in as the central point of coordination — managing the reconstruction vendor, acting as liaison between the insurance company and the contractor, and keeping the recovery moving through what became a 75 percent remodel of the building. With the administration space under repair with staff and students displaced, there was no room for delays or miscommunication between the parties involved; every decision I made had to balance speed, cost and quality so the building could reopen safely.”
When McMachen thinks about her legacy in facilities management, she doesn’t necessarily see it in terms of grand ambitions or buildings she has helped build, rather it’s the people that she has worked with during her time at Mapleton Public Schools and as an affiliate professor at MSU Denver.
“Watching people I've worked with go on to do great work of their own is, honestly, more meaningful to me than any building,” McMachen says. “If I've had any hand in that — in someone else's competence and confidence in this work — that matters more to me than having my name attached to any one project.”
McMachen is one of eight 2026 Facility Champions who will be profiled on FacilitiesNet leading up to the webcast, “What Great Facility Leaders Do: Lessons from the Field” that will honor the recipients. The webcast will air on November 24 at 12 p.m. CST on FacilitiesNet. You can register to view the webcast here.
Mackenna Moralez is the managing editor of the facilities market and the host of the Facilities in Focus podcast.
