ATC Hosts 2007 Southeast Consortium Rick Perkins Competition

Last week Altamaha Technical College, along with Okefenokee, Ogeechee, Savannah, and Southeastern Technical Colleges, competed in the 2007 Southeast Consortium Rick Perkins Award held at the C. Paul Scott Polytechnical Center, on the ATC campus in Jesup. ATC has hosted the event for the last several years due to its central location among the consortium. 

Named in memory of Thomas “Rick” Perkins, an instructor at West Central Technical College, who received the DTAE Commissioner’s, Award of Excellence prior to his untimely death, the award is the state technical college systems’ version of an “instructor of the year” honor. 

Coordinated by Larry Roberson from the Department of Technical and Adult Education, or DTAE, and hosted by Dr. Ron Shafer, ATC’s Dean of Instruction and Director Institutional Effectiveness, each of the technical colleges sent their college winner, a judge from their local community, and their Rick Perkins coordinator for the competition.  Choosing the consortuim winner, it seems, was not an easy task with the judges deliberating straight through lunch and requesting for each contestant to return before the panel to answer an additional question.  According to Roberson, “In all my years of coordinating Rick Perkins, I have never seen a competition where it took this amount of time to choose a winner.”

In addtion, to the competition, each college winner was awarded a certificate for being the Rick Perkins representative for their college.  They included, Nursing Instructor Dailene McDaniel for Altamaha Tech, Math Instructor Bee Hart for Southeastern Tech, Automotive Instructor Ben Rodriguez for Savannah Tech, Automotive Instructor Larry Carr for Okefenokee Tech, and CIS Instructor Terry Hand for Ogeechee Tech.   The winner of the competition will be announced in September at the annual Lighthouse conference on Jekyll Island.