More than 400 students enroll at Crowder's Nevada campus

The Nevada Campus of Crowder College began classes on Monday, Aug. 25, with a record enrollment of more than 400 students taking classes throughout the week. Nevada Crowder added six new adjunct instructors: Jerry Burch, Lyle Catron, Janice Lipoglav, Betty Stevenson, Chris Thomas, and Linda Tourtillott, bringing the number of instructors at the Nevada Campus to 37. Gary Wimmer moved from adjunct to half-time faculty.

"We're so excited about our growth in students and instructors. We've had an extremely busy summer and especially the past few weeks. Students could enroll in classes through Friday, Aug. 29. The official count of students at all Crowder campuses will not be available until later in September on the official "count day" but preliminary numbers indicate a healthy growth at all sites," said Nevada Campus Director, Donna Thomas. "It's unbelievable that the Nevada Campus has more than doubled enrollment and number of graduates in the past two years."

Thomas went on to say, "Janet Reed was hired to be our full-time student services coordinator on July 1 and she really hit the road running. Of course, she'd been one of our outstanding half-time communications faculty for several years already, so she had a great sense of our students and many of the processes for which she's responsible. She's doing an outstanding job of handling advising, testing, enrolling, financial aid, tutoring, activities, and recruiting. There are only three of us who are full-time, besides the nursing faculty, and each of us wears many hats." The Nevada Crowder RN program now has 50 students allowed in the program. This is double what the program started with in 2007. Linda Berns is the coordinator and Linda Douglas is a full-time instructor. "Both come to us with great credentials and both nursing and teaching experience. Linda Douglas has been the coordinator of the highly successful Nevada LPN program for a number of years," said Thomas.

"Our biggest need is to be able to expand our pool of great instructors. We especially need daytime science instructors, accounting (day or night), English, and algebra (including all lower levels of math). Instructors with Master's degrees in their academic disciplines (or professional degrees such as attorney, physician, pharmacist, or CPA, etc.) or Master's degrees with at least 18 graduate hours in their discipline and actual work experience in their discipline are always welcome to apply for adjunct positions. A person could teach up to 11 credit hours a semester. We typically run our classes in one three-hour block, two 1.5 hour blocks, or in the case of 5-hour science classes, two 3-hour blocks. If we have an instructor who drives a distance, and wants to teach more than one class, we schedule two or three classes in one day's time. We work to accommodate schedules, and we have classes Monday through Thursday -- no Fridays," said Thomas.