The 2023 Excellence in Education Awards, hosted by the Hillsborough Education Foundation in partnership with Hillsborough County Public Schools, recently recognized outstanding educators at the county’s public schools, including 11 in New Tampa.
Each school nominated one candidate for the each of the three county-wide awards — Teacher of the Year, Ida S. Baker Diversity Educator of the Year and Instructional Support Employee of the Year.
While none of the District winners were from New Tampa’s schools, it is an honor to be nominated for the many deserving teachers and support staff at all of our local schools.
Congratulations to the New Tampa nominees for Teacher of the Year (pictured on this page), and the Ida S. Baker Diversity Educators and Instructional Support Employees (not pictured).
Shanika Abdullah Math Wharton HighShelley Lambert English Turner/Bartels K-8 SchoolLaura Dodds Gromkov 5th Grade Tampa Palms ElementaryShannon Seavey-Simpkins 5th Grade Chiles ElementaryMegan Boghosian Language Arts Liberty Middle SchoolJulie Terry 3rd Grade Heritage ElementaryYvonne Vasquez 5th Grade Hunter’s Green ElementaryRebecca Santamaria English Freedom HighScott Owen Physical Education Clark ElementaryCarrie Frump Reading Benito Middle School
The Computer Emergency Room team: (l.-r.) Co-owner Jamie Hess, KRATE store manager Josh Hess, co-owner Joe Hess, Bruce B. Downs store manager Alexandra Horne and Mirada store manager Joe Hess III. (Photos: Charmaine George)
The popular Gadgets Emergency Room has expanded to three locations and will soon add a fourth…and has a new name, too.
Brothers and co-owners Jamie Hess and Joe Hess, Jr., have owned a thriving business in upstate New York, called Computer Emergency Room, since 1991. When Jamie — who also owns Treble Makers Dueling Piano Bar & Restaurant — moved to Florida in 2018, the pair bought a local tech repair store in the Shoppes at New Tampa located just south and east of the corner of S.R. 56 and Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd.
Now, they are merging the company’s Tampa-area locations with their New York-based business, bringing it all under one umbrella — as Computer Emergency Room.
“Along with changing our name to Computer Emergency Room, we’re expanding our business-to-business support division, doing network support, computer repair, cloud backup, remote monitoring – essentially all technical support,” Jamie says.
Jamie adds that whether a business is running high-end servers or just needs technical support for an individual workstation, Computer Emergency Room will come out on-site and provide the fix you need.
And, while the name is changing to reflect the emphasis on business services and to merge the brothers’ businesses, Jamie says the retail locations will continue offering the services local customers have come to depend upon.
For anyone who has a laptop that’s unusually slow, a tablet that stops working, or a phone screen that shatters, Computer Emergency Room can offer a quick fix — usually within hours — at a reasonable price.
Over the past year, new locations have opened at the KRATE at The Grove container park in Wesley Chapel and in the growing Mirada development in San Antonio. A fourth location — at the corner of Livingston Rd. and County Line Rd. in Lutz, where a new Publix just opened — is expected to open by the end of this year.
“Nothing will change at our retail locations,” Jamie explains. “All four locations will continue to offer all services.”
Additional technicians are being hired to support the expansion of the number of locations and the business services, and the company has branded vans on the road for technicians who support area businesses.
He says businesses can pay hourly, or sign up for a service contract that offers unlimited support. He says some contracts include weekly preventive maintenance, but most are on call, where businesses dial up Computer Emergency Room whenever they have a problem.
“This is something we’re currently doing,” Jamie says, “and we even go to homes to fix personal computers and connect networks.”
It’s A Family Affair
The family-owned business includes two stores managed by Joe’s sons. Joe Hess III manages the Mirada location, while Josh Hess (photo on next page)manages the KRATE store. Meanwhile, the BBD location is managed by Alex Horne, who has worked there for more than 10 years. While a manager has not yet been hired for the new location on Livingston, the Hesses expect to promote from within the company.
Jamie says they expect to expand to more locations, too, and are looking at opening stores in Tampa, Trinity, and even as far south as Bradenton.
And, while the business branches out, the Hess family remains firmly connected to the New Tampa and Wesley Chapel areas, with Jamie serving on the Board of Directors for the North Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce, and they’re excited to have a Computer ER location in the trendy KRATE container park.
“We’re getting a lot of traffic at our KRATE location,” says Jamie. “KRATE is doing a nice job with events to get people there.”
In fact, that’s how Rich Bussey was first introduced to Computer Emergency Room.
He and his wife, Jenny, own Boba Macs Tea & Eat, a shop in the KRATEs located directly across from Computer Emergency Room.
“We were in the process of opening and our internet service provider didn’t install the line running into the building correctly,” Rich says. “I spent three weeks trying to get them to fix it, arguing back and forth, and going through a lot of finger pointing.”
Rich said it was a devastating blow. He and Jenny are first-time business owners, and also work full-time at other jobs, so a three-week delay was “crushing.”
Especially after Covid had pushed their dream business opening back, the Busseys were anxious to get up and running, but there was no way to open their store without a point of sale (POS) system, and that couldn’t be installed without internet.
One day in late August, Rich says the techs “across the way” at (then-Gadgets) Emergency Room offered to take a look at the wires Boba Macs’ service provider still hadn’t come out to assess.
“They immediately found the problem, fixed it, and my internet was up and running within minutes,” Rich says. “I was able to have someone come out that same day to set up my POS system that had been sitting there gathering dust for three weeks. I was mind blowing-ly impressed at how proactive they were at finding a solution and providing phenomenal service.”
Rich says that being in the service industry, he often finds himself having casual conversations with people, and occasionally that talk works its way around to someone’s frustrations with their phone, tablet or laptop.
“I always suggest they pop in across the way and let them take a look,” he says. “Those same people usually come back and thank me, saying they previously spent hours on the phone with their tech support and got nowhere, but spent five minutes over there and they fixed it.”
Computer Emergency Room (formerly Gadgets Emergency Room) has four locations. Its original shop, at 1750 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., and newest location at 30925 Mirada Blvd. in San Antonio, are both open Mon.-Fri.,10:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m., and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturdays. The Computer ER location at KRATE (5854 Goldview Pkwy.), is open Tues.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m., noon-6 p.m. on Saturday and noon-5 p.m. on Sunday. The new store will be opening at the corner of E. County Line Rd. and Livingston Ave. later this year.
For more information about any of the stores, call (813) 939-HELP (4357) or visit ComputerEmergencyRoom.com.
Attorney Elizabeth Devolder (center) and her team at the Law Firm of Elizabeth Devolder, located just off the Bruce B. Downs Blvd. exit off I-75. (Photo provided by Elizabeth Devolder)
Attorney Elizabeth Devolder says that, these days, she’s seeing a lot of families who have suffered through the pandemic — and even the stress of having to prepare for Hurricane Ian — and are thinking about what would happen if they or someone they love were to pass away or become incapacitated.
The Law Office of Elizabeth Devolder, which Devolder launched in January 2021, is ready to help. The boutique firm is located in the Tampa Palms Professional Center, just off the Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. exit of I-75 in Tampa Palms.
Devolder earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) law degree at the Tampa campus of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Riverview in 2016, after a successful career in advertising and sales management. She had previously earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in Corporate Communications from the College of Charleston, SC, in 1997. For five years, Elizabeth worked jointly with her ex-husband Bryan Devolder at their Devolder Law Firm.
Associate attorney Rachael Alexander was previously a case manager, working closely with Elizabeth while going to law school and helping her found the new firm.
In her new firm, Devolder — with support from Rachael and a growing staff, including a legal assistant and case manager — continues to handle estate planning and probate matters, and Devolder’s clients say she is both smart and compassionate.
When Christine Smith’s husband died four years ago, she says she hired Devolder to help her.
“It was really overwhelming,” Smith explains, “but she asked me things gently and slowly and spent so much time with me at one of the worst times of my life.”
Smith says Devolder’s compassion is only half of the reason she is so pleased with her experience with the firm.
“She’s also probably the smartest person I’ve ever met in real life,” says Christine Smith. “She’s really sharp.”
Elizabeth Devolder
After working out her own estate plan, Smith brought her young adult son in, too, to set up documents that would allow her to make medical decisions for him if he were to ever become temporarily or permanently incapacitated. Devolder recommends a number of documents — such as a Power of Attorney and others that may apply to your unique situation — for everyone, so that someone you choose has the authority to care for you if something unexpected happens.
Christine then introduced her 91-year-old father to Elizabeth, who handled his documents, as well. “We’re multigenerational clients,” she says.
Devolder says she helps many families like Christine’s, who are experiencing the crunch of what she calls the “sandwich generation,” where children are becoming adults but still need a lot of support from their parents, while their older parents also are becoming increasingly needy.
“You have a lot of people depending on you,” Devolder says.
Another multigenerational client is JoAnne Tucker, a Hunter’s Green resident who first hired Devolder to help her handle her brother’s estate when he began showing signs of dementia and ultimately passed away.
“The entire process can be so confusing,” Tucker says. “But, sitting down with Elizabeth was very comfortable. She and Rachael always answered all of my questions — no matter how many times I asked — and helped me to be confident that I had all of the information I needed and knew exactly what to do next.”
Later, Tucker went back to Devolder to prepare her own documents. Then, her mother and sister worked with Elizabeth, as well.
Devolder says you shouldn’t do what you heard your neighbor did, or take a friend’s generic advice.
“My job is to take what I know about the law and apply it to a specific set of facts,” Devolder explains, “because the documents you might need depends upon the makeup of your family — such as how many kids you have, if your family is blended, if there is conflict in the family, and the makeup of your assets.”
Devolder says that the entire Baby Boomer generation will be age 65 by 2030, and that 75 percent of people over age 65 will need some type of long-term care. She says she can help you plan for that care to help your family avoid spending too much of its resources on that care.
While many people don’t want to think about the possible need for long-term care — which is required when someone needs help bathing, feeding, dressing or going to the bathroom — Devolder says that now is the time to start planning for it.
“When it was time for your kids to go to college, you didn’t first start looking at colleges the week before they were supposed to start classes,” she says. “The time to plan for that is well in advance. It’s the same with long-term care.”
Attorney Elizabeth Devolder is pictured here with her grandfather Harry Constantine Demosthenes and great aunt Electra Demosthenes Kageorge (both now deceased). Elizabeth’s new business venture, The Legacy Studio, will be a video studio located inside her law firm that will help families capture and preserve the stories of their older generations.
The Legacy Studio
Devolder’s desire to help families goes beyond just preserving their financial assets and planning for the future. She says she has a passion to help people protect their entire respective legacies, including their memories.
To that end, she is opening up a second business located inside the law office that will allow families to preserve their older generation’s most precious recollections.
She says the idea came to her when a client told her he thought he knew the stories his grandmother told, but after she passed away, they were lost. Then, the client’s mother also passed away, and he realized her stories were lost, as well. He told Elizabeth he wanted to write his own stories down for future generations, so that those precious memories would be preserved.
The idea of preserving people’s memories resonated with Devolder, but she realized that technology allows us to do much better than just writing things down.
“How you tell the story is part of the story,” she says, adding that video is the ideal medium for preserving these legacies. So, she created The Legacy Studio to provide that opportunity for not only her legal clients, but for anyone who wants to preserve their precious memories.
She says her clients have welcomed the idea and that the studio website will be up and running soon at www.LeaveYourLegacyStudio.com, although Devolder says she doesn’t yet have a scheduled grand opening date.
She is hoping The Legacy Studio will bring families together, and allow grandparents and parents to leave their stories as a legacy for their children.
The Law Office of Elizabeth Devolder is located at 5383 Primrose Lake Cir., Suite C, in the Tampa Palms Professional Center. It is open Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m.–6 p.m. For more info or to make an appointment, call (813) 319-4550, or visit ElizabethDevolder.com.
Wharton High’s drum line has brought home the “W” in a local battle for the best, held on Oct. 15 as part of the King High School Lion’s Pride Marching Festival.
While the festival, established in 1997, primarily helps high school bands sharpen their skills on the, ah, march to the height of the season, it allows drum lines the opportunity to choreograph a performance to show off their talents, too, in the Lion’s Pride Battle of the Drum Lines.
When the Wharton students asked director Marques Rudd if they could plan a routine for the competition, he signed them up. They did the rest.
Percussion captain Josh Benalcazar and other percussion leaders — including AJ Coveyou, Clara Riusech and Jeya Williams — came up with music, visuals, and choreography. Then, they planned rehearsals for all 18 members of the school’s drum line.
In addition to playing rhythm and cadences on snares, tenors, bass drums and cymbals, they created choreography to determine their placement on the field, and added visuals such as dancing, swaying, and moving in eye-catching and fun ways.
Wharton won the Lion’s Pride Battle for the first time ever. The Wildcats stunned five-time defending champion Strawberry Crest in the semifinals, and then were chosen as the best drum line in the finale against Spoto.
“It was crazy to me that we were able to put this together entirely student-led,” Benalcazar says proudly. “We had to really think outside the box and be creative.”
Rudd agrees that the students’ creativity is what propelled them to take home the competition’s bragging rights.
“Their interaction with the crowd was awesome,” he says. “They even threw in some cartwheels and something from the Cha Cha Slide.”
Rudd says he’s proud of the students and the fact that they came together to create something they weren’t required to do as a class assignment. He noticed their hard work, and it paid off for them.
“It was surreal when we won and they called our name,” says Josh. “It took a minute for it to process in my brain. It was a dream for me to be able to win such a big competition.”
Pastor Garrett Hamblen and his wife Katterine are celebrating the one-year anniversary of Spark Church, which holds its services at B&B Theatres at The Grove at Wesley Chapel.
While Spark Church is just a little more than a year old and is still relatively small, Pastor Garrett Hamblen says the church is already making an impactful difference in the community.
Members gather weekly for worship on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. at the B&B Theatres at The Grove movie theater (located north of S.R. 54, just west of I-75). But, they actually do much more than just that.
The church members have chosen to focus on four community needs they see in Wesley Chapel and the surrounding areas, including foster care, human trafficking, schools and pregnancy care centers.
“We are moving forward in a lot of big ways,” Pastor Garrett says, “and doing things that have never been done in our area, that I’m aware of.”
For example, Pastor Garrett says that the church members are working to create a foster care support network, with the goal of bringing other churches on board to support the efforts.
“We had 15 people go through training from a national-level organization that teaches churches how to do this,” he says. “We want to rally around foster families in the area — even though currently there are none in our church — and meet their physical needs, such as buying new clothes or a bed for a kid who gets dropped off at 2 a.m., or even have our children’s ministry do babysitting for foster families.”
He says church members also are working with Bridging Freedom, a local organization that supports minor victims of human trafficking, offering a therapeutic safe home campus community for girls, ages 12-17, who have been rescued from forced prostitution.
Spark Church has formed a partnership to provide support that includes painting, landscaping, helping with the property and working on building a new home, as Bridging Freedom is expanding.
Pastor Garrett says his messages on Sunday mornings currently are focusing on the same theme.
“Each week, we pick a new problem in the community, look at what the Bible says about it, and talk about what the church should do about it,” he says. “Then, we go out and work towards that.”
While Spark Church is growing in the number of people who attend, Pastor Garrett says it’s also growing in “depth,” with 90 percent of its members serving the church at least once a month. The people who find the church tend to be those who are passionate about making a difference.
“They’ve been to churches that don’t do a ton of outreach, but they want to go deeper,” he says. “They want their lives to be more meaningful. They want to go out and fight for our community.”
He says they also want to do life together — and not just on Sunday mornings. Pastor Garrett says an astounding 95 percent of church members are involved in weekly “core groups” of people who meet together to study the Bible, support each other and develop friendships. The church also has interest groups, where people go out to dinner together, or get together to do crafts, play disc golf, or pursue some other hobby.
This sense of connectivity may be formed because so many people experienced the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and are now ready to get back into the community and make friends. And, Garrett says the church is ready to respond.
He says he moved to the area several years ago, when he took a job at Loving Hands Ministries, a drug rehabilitation program in Dade City. He also served as the young adult pastor, then executive pastor, for Calvary Assembly of God in Dade City.
He is licensed as a minister through the Assemblies of God and also has a Bachelor’s degree in Business and an Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree, both from Indiana State University in Terre Haute.
Garrett and his wife Katterine live in Wesley Chapel, just a few minutes away from the movie theater where the church meets.
On Sunday mornings, Spark Church takes over one wing of the theater, offering worship in a large theater, kids’ church in a smaller theater, and a nursery in a birthday party room. He describes the kids’ areas as “locked down” for safety, in a corner of the building where no public traffic passes by.
Miriam Ventilato lives nearby in Wesley Chapel and joined Spark Church with her family a little over a year ago.
She, her husband, Tony and their teenage kids — ages 18, 15, and 13 — are all involved in the ministries of the church, from singing with the worship team to putting out advertising flags to draw attention to the church’s meeting location.
“It’s not just one-and-done on Sunday,” Miriam says. “It’s doing small groups, working in ministry together, and volunteering together. You really become like a family, and people notice when you’re not there.”
That great sense of connectivity and willingness to work together leads to the outreach that she and others who participate in the church think is so important.
“We’re basically showing people the love of God through tangible ways however we can,” Miriam says, “whether that’s through partnering in work days or looking for opportunities to serve wherever there’s a need.”
Miriam adds that it’s easy to get on board with the idea that her church can make a difference in big community problems, just by touching one life at a time. It starts with her pastor and is encapsulated in the name of the church.
“I think that Pastor Garrett is contagious,” says Miriam. “He says, ‘What fills, spills.’ So, we want to fill ourselves up with things that make a difference so we can spill it out into the community, just sparking each other to bring change.”
Spark Church meets at the B&B Theatres Wesley Chapel–The Grove 16 (6333 Wesley Grove Blvd.) every Sunday at 10 a.m. For more information, visit SparkPasco.com.
