TORRINGTON – Hauling their lessons and supplies from building to building and room to room, agriculture instructors Monte Stokes, D.V.M., Amy Smith and Georgia Younglove were almost the gypsies of the Eastern Wyoming College faculty.

But their wandering days are over now. They’ve moved into their new home in the long-awaited Agriculture Technology Education Center on the EWC campus in Torrington.

“It’s nice to have a home,” Younglove said. “We’d always been just wherever anybody had space.”

And, with two dedicated labs along with classrooms, a lecture hall, exhibit area and more, both faculty and students have already noticed a difference.

“We always felt like we were stepping on somebody’s toes,” Stokes, who’s also chair of the department, said. 

“I know nobody ever said that, but we always felt, ‘We’re in welding’s way or we’re in vet tech’s way,’” he said. “It really is nice to have a home.”

Stokes, in addition to leading the department of three full-time instructors augmented by adjunct instructors, teaches primarily animal science. Smith’s focus is agronomy, soils and crop science. 

Younglove teaches “a broad array,” she said, from animal science to range and agribusiness. She also teaches livestock judging and leads the judging and show teams at the college.

Before, the ag department shared space with the college’s premier Veterinary Technician program, lauded as one of the best, at least in the region if not further. While the sharing of classrooms and more worked, it wasn’t an ideal situation, for either program, Smith said.

“Vet tech is a more specialized arena than what we are,” she said. “They need specialized equipment and specialized labs.

“We made it work, because that’s what we had, and vet tech never made a fuss,” Smith said. “Now they’re able to specialize their labs for what they need in that building, and we’re able to do more of what we need.”

The three remember – not always fondly – having to haul lessons, equipment and more to classrooms around the EWC campus to teach, only to have to tote it back to where they started at the end of the class. Now, with labs and facilities dedicated to their specific disciplines, they’re able to set things up and leave them there without the worry of being in someone’s way or, worse yet, having equipment or experiments damaged.

Younglove recalled a plant identification class she taught. One of the vital tools of the class are plant mounts – preserved examples of different plant varieties. They’re vital to a plant identification course – and they can be very delicate.

“I was started out scheduled to teach in Tebbet (building), which means I’m picking up all these plant mounts and walking over to Tebbet,” she said. “Then I turn around and walk back with all the plant mounts.

“The real challenge comes when students have to study those (plant mounts) to learn them, but I don’t have someplace to leave them out all the time,” Younglove said. “Literally they lived in my office – students had to come to my office, check them out to study and bring them back.”

Today, the mounts reside in a special cupboard, which students can access any time, Younglove said. And that’s just one example among many.

“And I carried bags of soil from the Tebbet building to the vet tech building,” Smith recalled. “Literally, bags of soil.”

It all begins to get tedious after a while. But it’s not just greater convenience for the agriculture faculty. It’s a two-way street.

“Where I used to teach anatomy is now a dedicated wet lab (in the vet tech department) for animals, where they’re doing a lot of hands-on,” Stokes said. “And now, when my kids are studying anatomy, they have a dedicated space. They don’t have to worry about getting everything out of the way for the next animal lab that’s coming in.”

Though major construction on the ATEC facility was finished in time for classes to get underway at the beginning of the fall semester, there’s still work to be done. Construction was still going on during those first days of classes and there’s still furniture and equipment to be secured and set up. Stokes estimated it could be a year or more – based on the college’s experience with the Career and Technical Education Center, dedicated in 2017. It wasn’t unexpected, he said.

“It’s just growing pains, getting things unpacked, getting them where they need to be,” Stokes said. “There’s a lot of things that are going to be going on.”

Overall, however, the addition of the ATEC building to EWC will benefit both the school and the agriculture program. In the past, for example, Smith, Stokes and Younglove said, they were confident in saying EWC missed enrolling some students who ended up going to other schools because, until now, there wasn’t an ATEC at the college.

“We have a lot of students who apply to come to school here, whatever the reason, they don’t come here,” Stokes said. “We don’t know.”

Younglove was confident, though: “We tend to lose them to schools that do have dedicated agriculture education spaces.”