Tina Getz, Ph.D., 18 years
Faculty, Developmental Studies English Lab

While it says 18 years on her PPCC plaque, Getz has spent more than 40 years in the field of education. Getz grew up in Lakewood, New Jersey. She earned her Bachelors Degree in Psychology with a minor in English, then went on to earn her Masters Degree in Education with a minor in English through the National Teachers Corps. Her focus was geared toward inner city and disadvantaged students. She participated in a two-year program in Indiana, where she went to school during the summers in Terre Haute, and took classes and worked as a teacher’s aide during fall and spring at inner city junior high and high schools in Gary, Indiana.

Getz taught junior high for four years in New Jersey before coming to Colorado in 1973. She first moved to Trinidad, and worked for nine years at Trinidad State Junior College, starting part time with the vocational tutoring program, and ending up as full time director of the Student Support Services program. She and her family moved to Colorado Springs in 1983, and she enjoyed staying home with her young son for the first year. She provided home day care for three years, then worked for Silver Key and in her husband’s accounting practice, before finally returning to her main love, education, at PPCC in 1987. She started in the Developmental Studies Lab for Math and Writing, which later split into two separate labs, and also taught overload classes in College Prep English, Reading, and Study Skills. She earned her Doctoral Degree from Colorado State University in 2003.

Getz enjoys being a lifelong learner, and says that her career in education has been extremely fulfilling. She loves being in an environment where she can share her love of learning with her colleagues, and nurture it in her students. She says it’s exciting to work with disadvantaged students - they have so much to gain, and are trying to make big changes in their lives. She loves working with motivated students who see college as an opportunity to make a positive change in their life, but it’s a joy to see reluctant students who don’t understand what college is all about, discover the powerful difference that education will make to their futures. It’s so much more than acquiring knowledge and passing tests; it’s developing thinking skills.

Getz says that there are many wonderful opportunities at PPCC for personal and professional enrichment, and that working here has allowed her to develop herself and to pursue her interests. She has been awarded several PPCC Mini Grants, which she says are fantastic opportunities to expand and be creative about teaching, and is now doing a Learning Community. She claims that working at PPCC has forced her to keep up with advances in technology, and that while she won’t miss grading papers, she will definitely miss all the wonderful people she has worked with.

Getz and her husband Tom plan to drive to Warner Robbins, Georgia in June, to attend their son’s ceremony, where he will be pinned as a Captain in the Air Force. Every year, she and her two sisters and a cousin go on an excursion to various desGetztions, and this year, they will go to Moscow, Russia to visit another cousin and her husband who took a job there. Her plans include working on the house, taking camper trips to explore the many beautiful parts of Colorado, and looking for good travel deals to the warmer climates Tom prefers in the winter.

Richard “Rich” Harms, 34 Years
Math Faculty, Mathematics & Technology Division

Currently on a post-retirement contract, Harms has worked at PPCC for more than 34 years. He came to PPCC in 1974, and worked in the Blanca Building, on the city’s West Side. He is originally from the town of Ulysses in southwest Kansas. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Math with a solid base of teacher education courses from Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas in 1964. He then went overseas, and taught for two years in the American School in the Republic of Congo, teaching the children of American business people, missionaries, and military personnel who were stationed there.

When Harms returned to the U.S., he went back to work on his Master’s Degree at Kansas State University, where he held a position as teaching assistant. Harms earned his Master’s Degree in Mathematics in 1968, and that fall, he was excited to take a job in Kansas City, Kansas teaching at Sumner High School, an all-black inner-city school. Since Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated that spring, it was a volatile and tense time in history. He made many fast friends during his six years there. He also met his future wife at the church they both attended, and they married in 1971. He taught there until 1974, when the family moved to Colorado Springs and he was hired to teach at PPCC. For years, he taught mostly Developmental Studies Math, as well as Technical Math and Math Problem Solving for vocational students. 

Once Centennial campus opened in the Fall 1978, he taught at this campus until 2003, when he was split between Downtown and Rampart for two years, and is now full time at Rampart. During his tenure at PPCC, he was Math Department Chair for many years, served on the Retention Committee, and was Interim Dean on several occasions for Developmental Studies and also for the Math & Technology Division after a reorganization. He was the PPCC Faculty of the Year for 2001, a well-deserved honor.

Harms’s hobbies include tennis, elk and pheasant hunting, and fishing. After retirement, Harms says he is going to take a sabbatical this summer and take it easy, take their fifth wheel camper on fishing trips with friends, attend a family reunion this fall in Michigan, help with the fall harvest at his wife’s family farm in Burton, Kansas, and maybe attend his wife’s 45th class reunion. He and his wife would love to take cruises to Alaska and Hawaii. They have three grown children, a son in Kansas and two daughters here in Colorado Springs.

Harms says that working at PPCC has really been a lot of fun, and that he thoroughly enjoyed all of his students. Retirement is bittersweet, and he hates to give up teaching and interacting with the students, faculty and staff. He is looking forward to taking it easy for a while, but will soon become involved in volunteer work and contribute to the community.

Sandra Johannsen – 12 years
Disability Specialist, Office of Accommodative Services & Instructional Support (OASIS)

Now that she’s officially retired, Johannsen is out traveling. Debbie Omdahl, the administrative assistant in OASIS for many years, says, “Sandy was excellent with students and we all thought very highly of her.” Johannsen has a Master’s Degree in counseling and has a private Marriage and Family Counseling practice downtown. She was a “host mother” to a student from Nepal who got his Associate’s Degree at PPCC, and he’s been staying with her for about seven years. She has been a great asset in the OASIS office.

Anne Maestas, 19 years
Dental Assisting Faculty, Health, Environmental, Natural & Physical Sciences Division

Now on a post-retirement contract, Maestas is on her 20th year at PPCC teaching in the Dental Assisting program. In all those years, she never took a sick day for herself, and only missed two sick days when her son was in the hospital. She has also been at every single graduation ceremony, every year just as enthusiastic as the year before! She says, “I’m CRAZY about graduation and I’m sad that this will be my last one!”

A rare Colorado Springs native, Maestas graduated from Palmer High School, followed by a BA in Psychology from the University of Colorado. She has hours towards a master’s degree at UNC, worked 17 years as a dental assistant, and has held a certificate in dental assisting for 25 years. Maestas absolutely loves teaching and says she will miss it very much; however, to stay in touch with students, she hopes to come back and work part-time for the Career Planning and Advising Center. 

Maestas says, “The most fun I ever had at PPCC was playing Jingle Bells with a dental drill on an impression tray. I was in a ‘band’ and we played it for Dr. Paulsen.” (Aside: Hmmm, we didn’t know the dreaded dental drill could provide such entertainment and humor! Good to know….) Maestas was the Outstanding Faculty of the Year in 2002. Her name is etched on a special brick permanently displayed at the Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) office in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a  special commendation from a former student who is now a practicing dentist. Maestas was presented with an award of appreciation for her dedication to KIND, Kids in Need of Dentistry, an organization that provides dentistry for children without medical insurance. One of her proudest moments as a teacher was when the HOSA AVP students took first place in dental assisting at the HOSA competitions in Ft. Collins. Additionally, she was nominated three times for Who’s Who Among American Teachers.

Many recall that Maestas lost her husband of 30 years in 2000. She says he was always very supportive and involved in her career. They had two children, Andrew and Erika, who are both grown and doing well in their lives. Maestas plans to spend more time taking care of her 92-year-old mother, who still lives on her own.

At the end of her teaching career, Maestas says, “What means the most is watching students go from being single parents on welfare to being able to get off welfare and becoming self-sufficient. They can finally buy food and clothes for their children. I love to watch them grow.”

Steve Milligan, 10 Years
Reference Librarian, PPCC Libraries

Milligan was born and raised in Denver, and earned his Master’s Degree in Library Science at Denver University. While it says 10 years on his plaque, Milligan really has many more years in education. He started at PPCC in 1976 in the old Safeway building on the West Side, as a full-time librarian on a two-year grant. Then he was hired part time as a communications instructor, and soon went full time, teaching for several years. Unfortunately, he was then laid off during the budget crisis in the mid-1980’s.

Milligan says that the idea that it’s impossible to learn a language after age 40 is a complete myth - he started learning Spanish in his 40’s, when he took a class from Tim Davis, and ended up fully fluent. In fact, he studied extensively in Spain and in Mexico, and came back to PPCC as a Spanish instructor in the mid-90’s, later moving into his current realm of reference librarian.

Over the years, he has taken many PPCC groups on educational trips to various destinations in Mexico, including the Sociology Club, groups of faculty, and numerous groups of the Danish exchange students. Many of the excursions were to the PPCC Sister City of Nuevo Casas Grandes, the neighboring world-famous pottery village of Mata Ortiz, and the Paquime archaeological site. He developed a relationship with the Cuernavaca Language School, and has taken Spanish students on trips there for more than 15 years. The students study and live with a Mexican family during their stay, gaining deep immersion into the language and culture. Milligan still takes groups of Danish students there for a week each October, and has visited Denmark several times to attend the Danish students’ graduation.

Milligan truly enjoys working with students, and says that for everything he put into his teaching, he got much more back. He says it’s vitally important to teach students how to think for themselves, and question assumptions. He loves teaching students to read analytically, and ask “what’s missing?” He tried to make the idea of information management more than just a dry structuralism, and asserts that the quality of our lives is deeply affected by our ability to manage the massive amounts of information we receive daily, and “navigate the waters of information overload.”

Milligan claims that research is an excellent skill for lazy people – those who want to do less and accomplish more, are well served to learn the secret nuances of good research skills.

Milligan plans to spend time taking care of his mother in Denver. His son is a currently a student at CU-Boulder, studying architecture. Milligan loves to read and travel, and plans to continue his trips to Europe and to Mexico.

Lee (Basil) Watson, 20 years
Custodial Supervisor, Facilities, Maintenance & Operations

Watson has worked all 20 of his years at PPCC in the Facilities & Operations department. For the past 13 years, he has been the custodial supervisor, with a large crew reporting to him. With the constant turnover of custodians and retraining involved, coupled with working nights for so many years, you might think Watson would have gotten burned out on what must be a difficult job. He didn’t, though, and says he actually is a night-owl and preferred working nights. He says that this job was just a good fit for him, all around. In his 20 years at PPCC, he worked for six Facilities directors and four presidents.

Prior to employment at PPCC, Watson spent 10 years in the Coast Guard, followed by 10 years in the U.S. Air Force, where he was a radar operator and air controller. His last assignment was in North Dakota in the 70s, at which time he retired from the military.

Watson and his wife are planning to travel a little, including a cruise or two. They have five grandchildren and he will spend more time enjoying them. He loves to garden and fish, and says he plans to share those interests with the grandkids.