Two Amarillo College students who collaborated last summer with the City of Amarillo to discern if locally captured mosquitoes carried harmful diseases are poised to present the details of their study at a national conference.

Marcus Baber-Newton and Dustan Francis will attend the 89th annual meeting of the American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA) Feb. 27-March 3 in Reno, Nev., where they will participate in the general poster competition.

It will be Shakespeare with a twist when the Amarillo College Theatre Arts Program presents The Merry Wives of SoHo, a comedy relocated – just for AC audiences – from Elizabethan England to a trendy New York City neighborhood.

“I chose to place our version of The Merry Wives of Windsor in America,” Monty Downs, instructor of theatre and the show’s director, said. “Shakespeare’s story is still the focus, but very little of the language is iambic parameter. Rather, it’s set in a modern place and time and intentionally has a Real Housewives feel.

Amarillo College (AC) is the very best community college in Texas, bar none, according to Intelligent.com, a trusted resource for program rankings and higher education planning.

Intelligent.com, which provides unbiased research to help students make informed decisions about higher education programs, has placed AC in the No. 1 spot on its list of the “Best Community Colleges in Texas” in 2023.

Amarillo College has a new head women’s volleyball coach who likely needs no introduction to enthusiasts of the sport, and not just those residing in the Texas Panhandle; Scott Sandel has helped produce winning teams from coast to coast.

In a career spanning 35 years, Sandel has assembled an impressive résumé that reflects his coaching prowess at the club, high school, and collegiate levels and conspicuously includes 10 NCAA post-season appearances.

Engineers from industry partners like Sandia National Laboratories, Xcel Energy, Pantex, BP, and the U.S. military will share their stories of academic and professional success during Amarillo College’s observance of Engineering Week.

The National Society of Professional Engineers celebrates Engineering Week each year in February, and this year’s theme is Changing the Future. In conjunction with that, AC will conduct its related events Feb. 21-23.

The Amarillo College Foundation is pleased to introduce a pair of newcomers who recently joined its dedicated staff – a development officer whose focus will be on the Liberal Arts Learning Community, and the first Alumni Coordinator in AC’s history.

Alumni Coordinator Katelynn Kenyon is a 2022 graduate of West Texas A&M University where she earned a bachelor of science degree in agricultural and media communication. A native of House, N.M., she served recently as a director of WTAMU’s new-student orientation program, Buff Branding.

For the third year in succession, Amarillo College is the recipient of a generous gift from the Panhandle Oilmen’s Foundation, which in 2021 established a scholarship at AC to support industrial technology majors.

The three co-founders of the non-profit Panhandle Oilmen’s Foundation – Jeff Moore, Kim Britten and Rick Johnson – presented a gift of $10,000 to the AC Foundation on Feb. 3.

Rochelle Fouts, instructor of education at Amarillo College, stresses to her students – future educators – that they will one day be charged with ensuring that the schools where they work have maximum appeal for students of their own.

“My job is to help aspiring teachers understand it is their job, their passion, to make students want to come to school,” said Fouts, who also serves as the Education Department’s faculty program coordinator. “You have to meet students where they are and show them where they can be, encourage them to go further.

Dr. Chris Hudson has long been drawn to the boundless crop circles that airline passengers cannot help but see blanketing the Great Plains, so much so in fact that he has drawn them – painted them, too.

But it was not until Hudson, an assistant professor of English at Amarillo College, began downloading and digitally embellishing images of crop circles that his handiwork proved truly satisfying.

The spirit of Valentine’s Day will echo with a resounding endorsement from some of the area’s most accomplished musicians when the 2022-2023 Art Force Piano Series resumes at Amarillo College.

The third installment of the Piano Series is titled “Jam with Love,” and it will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7 by a cavalcade of AC faculty and other special musical guests from the College’s family of musicians.

Academic excellence clearly is on the upswing at Amarillo College, where the Fall Dean’s List contains more than 800 names for the first time in school history.

The College is pleased to announce that a total of 812 full-time students achieved classroom success worthy of placing their names on the 2022 Fall Dean’s List.

Since 2021, full-time Amarillo College students who are Pell-Grant eligible have been welcome to apply for free or reduced on-campus child care through the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) Program.

Yet that federally-funded program for low-income parents became even more of a game-changer in 2022 when it was expanded to include scholarships in the after-school program at the Maverick Boys & Girls Club – open daily until 1 a.m.

As a newcomer to Amarillo College in 2021, Makayla Caudillo fully intended to bypass the cluster of exhibits that comprised Badger Connect, the showcase of clubs and organizations presented each semester during Welcome Week.

“I was a freshman, shy and nervous, and I was going to walk right past all that stuff on my way to class,” Caudillo said. “But before I could get past it, a guy who was vice president of SGA (Student Government Association) approached me.

The shoes he set out to fill were spacious, but Cade Foard, a music major at Amarillo College, was driven by familial allegiance and undaunted by the challenge.

This past August, the gifted AC violinist earned a seat on the Amarillo Symphony, where his father, the late Orin Foard, had impeccably performed as a bassist for more than 25 years.

Few will be surprised to learn that a member of Phi Theta Kappa National Honor Society has been chosen to serve as student speaker for Amarillo College’s Fall Commencement, which is at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 16 at the Amarillo Civic Center.

But the news did catch the speaker herself just a bit off guard.

In a testament to its transformative efforts in support of the state’s strategic plan for higher education, Amarillo College has been presented with what essentially is the gold standard of laurels earmarked for post-secondary schools in Texas.

AC received a prestigious Star Award from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) during that august body’s Higher Education Leadership Conference Dec. 7 in Austin.

Amarillo College is pleased to announce that it is one of three recipients of a Recognition of Dedication to Educational Outcomes (RODEO) Award courtesy of the Texas Success Center.

The Texas Success Center (TSC) is housed at the Texas Association of Community Colleges and operated through the Texas Community College Education Initiative, a nonprofit. It supports the community college districts in Texas to redesign the student experience through Texas Pathways.

The Amarillo College Theatre Arts Program is pleased to present On the Verge, a play that follows the jocular adventures of three highly independent lady explorers on an extraordinary journey that seems to take them through time.

While on a frolicsome jaunt that begins in 1888, they begin to absorb knowledge from the future, while meeting strange and wondrous characters, learning slang, and even debating the appropriateness of a lady wearing pants.

It will be a memorable milestone in more ways than one when the Associate Degree Nursing (ADN) program at Amarillo College conducts a Nursing Pinning ceremony for the 100th time in its storied history.

AC’s 100th Nursing Pinning, which will honor more than 100 AC nursing graduates, is from 6-8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 15 at Central Church of Christ, 1401 S. Monroe St. The landmark celebration is open to the public.

A compelling twin bill awaits concertgoers in December when both the Amarillo College Community Concert Band and AC’s Brass Ensemble will perform sequentially in the Concert Hall Theater on the Washington Street Campus.

The joint concert is scheduled from 7:30-9 p.m. Monday, Dec. 12. The event is free and open to the public.