Barton Features
“It was a God thing, really”
Life Challenge Moves Larned's Thomson to Medical Assistant Career
March 30, 2011
Attending college was the furthest idea from Larned resident Linda Thomson’s mind in December 2007. She had just undergone surgery for breast cancer and she was preparing for a long road of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. However, a friend and fellow cancer survivor knew it was the perfect time for Thomson to establish new goals and create a new purpose for herself.
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One of Barton’s first MLT Grads Trains Barton Students to Follow Her Profession
February 21, 2011
Dana Weber has always been interested in biology, but she first started thinking about a medical laboratory career in the mid 1970s as a student at Great Bend High School when she attended a career fair. That was the first time she met Leonard Bunselmeyer, then a medical technologist at Central Kansas Medical Center. His talk about hospital lab work made a distinct impression on her and helped put her on the path to a career as a medical lab technician.
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Barton’s Natural Gas Program Receives Gift of Equipment From Mentor
February 2, 2011
A generous donation of equipment to Barton Community College’s Natural Gas Transmission and Distribution Program has given a substantial boost to the program and its students. Randy Suhm of Suhm Consulting from Sweetwater, Texas, a supporter and mentor of Barton’s Natural Gas Program from the beginning, has donated $26,696 worth of equipment to the program.
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Making the Grade – Three Barton Students Take Different Paths in Earning Academic Distinction
January 24, 2011
The three Barton Community College students named to this year’s Phi Theta Kappa All-Kansas Academic Team will forever be linked together for earning their distinguished Phi Theta Kappa awards, but each has taken a different path to achieve success. The paragraphs below tell their stories.
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Soil Pit Allows Barton Ag Students to Play and Learn in the Dirt
January 11, 2011
To the average person, the gaping, 6-foot-deep soil pit that was dug last fall south of the Barton Community College campus is just a large, rectangular hole in the ground. To Barton Agriculture students, it’s a chance to play in the dirt and to earn college credit for doing it. But to Dr. Victor Martin, Barton’s Agriculture instructor, the huge hole represents a portal to wondrous discovery of what took place hundreds of years before with climate, earth and living beings.
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Dave Barnes: A Remarkable Director for a Remarkable Gallery
November 2, 2010
Dave Barnes was as surprised as most people when he stepped into Barton Community College’s Shafer Gallery for the first time and saw a gallery of such beauty, spaciousness and versatility in the midst of its rural central Kansas setting.
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New Barton Agriculture Instructor Prepares Students for Opportunities in Ag
September 22, 2010
The timing of Dr. Victor Martin’s arrival as Barton Community College’s new agriculture coordinator/instructor couldn’t have been better. Not only is the program getting a new instructor, it also has a new classroom and new equipment to put its students in the ideal setting for learning about agriculture and the careers it has to offer them.
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Barton Honors Wally Straub for Helping Establish Case New Holland Program
September 10, 2010
If not for Wally Straub and his persistence, Barton Community College would not have the Case New Holland Program it has today. Thanks to Straub’s insistence and perseverance with the Case New Holland Corporation, Barton was able to begin its pilot program in 1995 and turn it into a full-time program just one year later offering service training to Case New Holland workers across the country.
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Barton Community College Names Classroom to Honor Lois Alban
August 26, 2010
Lois Alban, who for many years has given generously to Barton Community College, traveled 1,000 miles to attend the Renovation Celebration Aug. 12 showcasing the College’s renovations involving three buildings on its campus. Now living in Mission, Texas, she continues giving to the College.
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Rising through the Ranks: Gerritzen Wears Many Hats in 35 Years at Barton
June 10, 2010
She was hired as a keypunch operator for Barton Community College, with no degree and no experience in the field of computers. She left full-time employment at Barton more than a week ago, having served as a faculty member and later an administrator, who earned a master’s degree. She’s proof that Horatio Alger exists in female form today.
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Barton Honors Caring Pathologist with Endowment to Aid MLT Students
April 28, 2010
Barton Community College is in the process of establishing an endowment to honor retired pathologist Dr. Edward “Dusty” Jones, who served as the catalyst for the College’s Medical Laboratory Technician program more than three decades ago.
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Magnificent Effort: Community Members Make College Dream a Reality
April 15, 2010
Where would the community be without the efforts of the Great Bend Jaycees, other community leaders and a determined newspaper editor who banded together to push a grassroots cause in the early 1960s? Sufficed to say, the community would be without Barton Community College, which has educated thousands of students and served as an economic engine to the community for more than four decades.
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CPI and Barton Partner to Grow Pension Administration Workforce
April 1, 2010
CPI Qualified Plan Consultants Inc. is the proverbial big fish in a small pond. As one of the nation’s largest providers of third-party administration, the company chooses to keep its home office in Great Bend, where it started as a life insurance company with three employees and then incorporated into a TPA company 38 years ago.
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Reading, Writing, and Romance – Couples Spend Lives Together After Meeting at Barton
February 19, 2010
In the fall of 1969, when Barton County Community Junior College opened for the first time to students, twins Dennis and Ken Wallace were high school juniors living nearly 300 miles away in their boyhood hometown of Pampa, Texas. Their distance to the College grew much closer later that year when their father moved the family to Great Bend for a job.
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Barton’s Haz-Mat Training Facility Hosts Specialized State Training
March 16, 2010
Barton Community College partnered with Geary County Emergency Management to host the highest level of hazardous materials training at Barton’s Hazardous Materials and Emergency Services Training Institute, Grandview Plaza, March 1-12. The specialized training was conducted by the Kansas State Fire Marshal’s Office and approximately 20 fire fighters representing Junction City, Manhattan, Abilene, Fort Riley, Coffeyville and Colby participated in the 80-hour Hazardous Materials Technician certification training. Fire fighters completed the course by passing the IFSAC accredited written examination, administered by the University of Kansas Fire and Rescue Training Institute on March 12.
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Barton Program Preps Workers for Flourishing Natural Gas Industry
March 22, 2010
Fourteen months ago the workforce bottom dropped out for Keith Frank. Two years into a promising career as a railroad conductor, working in South Dakota, he was one of 5,000 employees let go by the company, which was clobbered by the recession.
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Grassroots Effort Grows Strong Booster Club with Start of College
Jan. 20, 2010
A month before the first classes began at Barton Community College more than 40 years ago, the Cougar Booster Club formed in support of the College’s first student-athletes, who had yet to arrive on campus. The club organized in August 1969, when 25 area men gathered in a lecture hall on the newly built college campus to plan support for men’s basketball and men’s track and field, the only two athletic programs at Barton for the few years.
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First Class Relishes Rugged Experiences at Barton during First Years
December 17, 2009
Students attending Barton Community College 40 years ago endured unique experiences compared to their counterparts at other colleges of the day. Their environment was also drastically different from Barton students who have followed in their footsteps these past four decades.
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Last in Line Becomes First to Enroll at Barton
December 15, 2009
Forty years ago, 18-year-old Connie Kruckenberg became first by being last. The 1969 Great Bend High School graduate became the first student to enroll at Barton County Community Junior College on Sept. 3 of that year. As a student employee for the startup College, which was a day away from holding its first enrollment in the newly built library, Kruckenberg was manning the last enrollment table when the moment of historical significance came.
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Barton Celebrates 25 Years with Fort Riley Operations
November 4, 2009Kansas National Guard soldiers in Afghanistan take an online Western Civilization course in their off-duty hours. Nearly 10 thousand miles away at Fort Riley Army Base a soldier’s spouse concentrates in a classroom, while she is taking a daytime psychology course, on her way toward earning an associate’s degree. Nearby on base, soldiers are getting a detailed study of U.S. Department of Transportation fuel regulations. A few miles away from the base, EMT instructors prepare emergency workers for state certification. And a hundred miles west of the base, or even a few states away for that matter, employees of a manufacturing plant train on the proper handling of hazardous materials.
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New Instructors Bolster Barton Academics in 1970-71
October 14, 2009
During his first few weeks at Barton Community College, history instructor Gary Kenyon’s podium was a lower-level seat in the gymnasium where he lectured to students sitting a few seats above. His office was a carrel in the library where he packed up his belongings every afternoon only to bring them back the next morning.
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First Graduates Who Found Careers at Barton Look Back After 40 Years
October 12, 2009On May 15, 1971, Carol Davis and Linda Dodson were among the 200 students who walked across a platform in Barton Community College’s newly built gymnasium to become the College’s first graduating class.
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Business Community Establishes College’s Early Endowment Association
September 16, 2009Barton Community College Foundation owes its beginning to two business competitors who also were friends and shared a similar vision for a recently approved community college that was yet to be built. Insurance business owner Bruce Buehler, along with Grant Hoener, an agent with New York Life Insurance, believed that the upstart college needed an endowment association to help make it accessible to all area students. In early 1967, they visited with Board of Trustees Chairman Joe Mermis Jr., and he agreed.
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Peters Becomes First Female to Run and Serve as College Trustee
August 18, 2009
There was no sense of historical significance, and certainly no thought of one female breaking down late-1970s-barriers to the doors of male-dominated board rooms. In 1977, Bobbie Peters became the first woman to run for a seat on Barton Community College's Board of Trustees simply because she felt she was well qualified to carry out the duties of the position.
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Early Trustees Remember Their Roles in Forming College
Aug. 17, 2009
Among the elder statesmen who comprised the Board of Trustees for Barton Community College when the start-up college was being planned more than 40 years ago were two young leaders of the community. Dean Wells and Dr. Jerry Schrader, both in their mid-to-late 30s at the time, weren't original Board members, but they replaced two of the original members and were involved at the ground-breaking level of forming the new college.
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Frosh Forgoes University for Community College Opportunity
Aug. 7, 2009
Annalee Webb is a typical spring high school graduate preparing to transition to college life as the fall semester quickly approaches. She's eager and a bit anxious to get started. Still, little is traditional for the traditional student who hails from Gardner, Kan. Along with her belongings and dorm furnishings, Webb carries with her the responsibility of footing the bill for her college education.
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Barton Student Completes Medical Assistant Externship at CKMC
From the Great Bend Tribune, July 26, 2009Like many new college students, Jennifer Wood didn't know exactly what career path she should take. The medical field looked promising and after considering a few options, Wood has found her niche as a medical assistant.
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