This is not to diminish the importance to Wrangell of the mayor, schools superintendent, road maintenance crews, postal workers, or the butcher, baker or candlestick maker. But the school district’s activities director and the chamber of commerce executive director are among the more important jobs in town.

The hiring process is underway to fill both positions.

Anyone who has ever attended school or has kids in school or knows someone with kids in school knows how much activities mean to students. Whether basketball, volleyball, cross country, wrestling or swimming, whether arts or music events or technology programs, the 60 or so high schoolers, the middle school and elementary school students too, almost all participate in one or more activities.

That’s a lot of organizing travel and dealing with weather disruptions, ensuring eligibility and parental approval, collecting fees and keeping the books, and coordinating with visiting teams that travel to Wrangell — all under a part-time contract that falls far short of adequate pay. The last activities director earned $10,000 for a lot of full-time work over the entire school year.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with public service jobs, the rewards are high, the workload is heavy, but the pay is low. The schools are not exactly flush with cash these days.

The chamber director job is similar to the schools activities job, only its coordinating businesses, not students.

It’s about pulling together events to promote the business community so that there are more jobs in town, more opportunities for students to stay in town after they graduate, more sales tax revenues to pay for public services. It’s about working with the borough’s Economic Development Department for a coordinated effort on all of the above.

Neither the school job nor the chamber job is easy. In a town of about 2,000 people, there are probably 1,900 who have an opinion on how the jobs should be done, and many are not shy about sharing their opinions.

But that’s a good thing — it shows that people care. They want students to participate in activities and they want businesses to succeed.

The empty positions are just another example of the increasing difficulty in recruiting and retaining workers — not just in Wrangell, but throughout the state, particularly public service jobs.

Both the chamber and the school district have gone through several people in the two positions in recent years. That does not diminish their importance. In fact, it is a reminder of how important the jobs are, and the need to fill them soon.