College to honor three longtime professors
Flathead Valley Community College Board of Trustees, college President Jane Karas and the college faculty will recognize three emeritus honorees at a special celebration on the college campus on Friday, May 6.
The program to recognize Jeanette Oliver, Robert Beall and Tom Jay will be at 5 p.m. in the large community meeting room inside the Arts and Technology Building. The college invites community members to the event.
Following the program, past and present faculty and staff members are invited to a reception from 6 to 7 p.m.
Emeritus recognizes the contributions of retired faculty and administrators and their potential as a continuing valuable resource.
Oliver, professor emeritus, joined the faculty in 1980. In addition to teaching botany and biology, she had frequent nominations by her students for “Who’s Who Among American Teachers.”
Her outstanding service to the community college was recognized in 1997 with the Eagle Award. She was the first full-time faculty member to be awarded this honor.
Oliver continues to conduct original research and has been a contributor to a wide range of publications and several botany textbooks. To keep up with changing technologies in the microbiology, Oliver spent part of her sabbatical at the Centers for Disease Control Laboratories in Atlanta, where she learned the latest methods for working with microorganisms.
Oliver has served as division chair of the Mathematics and Sciences Division, in addition to serving on numerous other committees. She taught hundreds of students and she has maintained contact with many of her students as they successfully transferred to other institutions to obtain bachelors and advanced degrees.
She was an active member of the Montana Academy of Science and sponsored several students as they presented their projects and the organization’s annual symposia.
Beall, professor emeritus, dedicated 27 years of service to his students, both inside and outside the classroom. During his years as instructor of natural resources and biology, Beall spent much time developing and implementing a variety of geographic information and global positioning systems and remote sensing courses for the surveying and natural resources programs.
He has served three terms as division chairman and has represented the Natural Resources Department and Math/Science Division in numerous committee meetings.
Together with his wife, Ann, Beall has long directed the intercollegiate Logger Sports Team and its community service activities. In 1988, under his coaching, Flathead Valley Community College became the first two-year college to win the Association of Western Forestry Club’s annual Logging Sports Championship.
In 1993, Beall designed the college arboretum. In spring 1994, he and some local fifth-grade students planted the trees that now populate the area.
Jay, professor emeritus, set an exemplary model as a master teacher during his 21 years at the college.
He created and managed all business administration programs and was considered an informal mentor to teachers in this division, including his former student and fellow colleague business instructor Christopher Hanchett.
Jay led the creation of an occupational program review template that provides a more effective process for evaluating and making recommendations for programs.
In 2010, he initiated Montana’s first poplar tree test site on the college campus, a five-year effort to study which trees grow in Northwest Montana’s climate and which ones produce the largest amounts of biomass.
Students in natural resources and statistics courses and the service learning program have used the site for learning and community service.