FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 5/23/00

CONTACT:
Dave Disch
Director of College Relations and Marketing
Greenville College
(618) 664-6503

Greenville College Honors Four Retiring Faculty

At the close of the 1999-2000 academic year, Greenville College said farewell to four exceptional faculty members with a dinner held in their honor on May 22, 2000. With seventy-three years of combined service, each has left their mark on the tradition of excellence in education at Greenville College.

James Plett
James Plett, a 1965 graduate of Seattle Pacific College, has served Greenville College with distinction for twenty-six years. He completed his MA at the University of Washington and was four years into a doctoral program at the University of California at Riverside when he accepted the position of assistant professor at GC. For the past twenty years, Plett has served in various roles from chair of the English department to Registrar, and will retire as Dean of Academic Affairs.

Plett has also played an active role in the community by serving on the local school board for six years and most recently taking on the responsibility of treasurer at the Free Methodist church.

Plett will be joining his wife Linda in Seattle for retirement.

Leon Winslow
With the closing of this academic year, Leon Winslow has completed forty-four years of teaching and administration. He has spent twenty-one of those years at GC where he developed the science education program for elementary and secondary education majors as well as teaching Earth and Space and Astronomy.

Within the last twenty-one years, Winslow has developed an ever-growing relationship between GC and more than two hundred secondary teachers of biology, chemistry, and physics through the Eisenhower Summer Science Programs. During these one or two week periods, science teachers have had the opportunity to come to GC to develop new methods for presenting the ideas and principles.

Winslow will stay in Greenville, and will continue teaching part-time at the college.

Ralph Montgomery
Ralph Montgomery came to Greenville College during the 1982-83 academic year from Campbell University in North Carolina. He earned his Masters in Performance from North Texas State University where he was voted Outstanding Master's Student by Pi Kappa Lambda in 1963, and continued in doctoral studies at the Kansas City Conservatory.

The innovative major in Contemporary Christian Music at GC, designed by Montgomery in the late 1980s, has brought national recognition to Greenville College. Montgomery has flourished as the music department chair for the college as well as conducting the Greenville Municipal Band from 1983-1994, the Centralia Philharmonic Orchestra from 1984-1994, the Church Sanctuary Choir at the local Free Methodist Church for several years, as well as being a world class trumpet player and musician.

In retirement, Montgomery will continue to write music and play with various brass groups. He looks forward to attending concerts and art museums in St. Louis, and will be starting a Bible study class in his home along with his wife Mitzi.

Olga Estevez
After spending twenty-five years as teacher and administrator at the Instituto Evangelico, a Free Methodist school in the Dominican Republic, Olga Estevez came to Greenville College as a part-time lecturer in Spanish in 1986. In 1994, she joined the faculty full-time. Estevez has also taught a Bible study class on Sunday mornings in her home in which GC students and local Spanish-speaking residents attend.

She and her husband Rolando plan to return to the Dominican Republic after her retirement, but first plan to spend time in the US visiting their three sons and two daughters.

Last updated: May 25, 2000