Bring a Kid to Work Day

SPP employees showed off their work superpowers to our "new hires" at the annual "Bring a Kid to Work Day."

This is one of many events SPP stages to build relationships among employees, their families and the community.

During the 2025 Bring a Kid to work day, about 30 students and parents were eager to get the day started with a tour of the on-campus generator. Senior Critical Facilities Technician , Chris Marr, explained to them why having the generator was so important.

"This generator will keep our campus running in the event that our power goes out, so that the operating center doesn't have anything to worry about", he said.

Marr showed students through the generator (big enough to walk through) and once they "toured" the inside, he fired it up so they could hear how incredibly loud and powerful it is.

After the generator tour, our new littlest employees gathered in the auditorium to get to work. John Gunter was their onboarding specialist for the day and walked them through several different projects including a water table exercise where they practiced the difficult task of balancing electricity on the power grid. Groups of students stood around the water table and each one was assigned a job -- leaders, generators, transmission, utilities and the end use consumer.

Leaders directed their teams to use the water, which represents generation, to fill the main bucket that distributes the generation across the transmission lines. Working together was a must to ensure enough generation filled the buckets, that the main tub didn’t overflow, and that transmission lines handled the load on the system.

After students successfully completed their first task and learned some valuable lessons such as teamwork, communication and the importance of not overloading the system, it was time to break out into specialized sessions. Students participated in activities that included creating a circuit, a coding session and a building task.

Once all projects had been completed, students regrouped with Gunter and debriefed on the day.

"I had a lot of fun today", many of the children exclaimed.

SPP's 2025 "Bring a Kid to Work Day" on April 24 was the ninth year for the event, said Mia Phillips from Human Capital. She said "the day is a fun way to reinforce the importance of building and maintaining community at SPP and providing more people with the opportunity to learn about the important work that we do here. Hopefully it will also help with future recruitment efforts by getting students interested in the industry early on."

Senior Corporate Trainer, Becky Barnello brought her son, Dominic to the event and said "Dominic had a great time and learned so much about SPP and what we do. He talked about the water table for the rest of the day and how cool our building is. He said he can't wait to come back next year!"

Thank you to the staff, parents, and of course, our "newest hires" for making this day so fun!