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By ALAN HOSKINS, Kansan Contributor

Kansas City Kansas Community College not only got an outstanding instructor but a whole lot more when it elevated Dr. Steve Collins to a full-time faculty member in 1978.

Collins first gained statewide recognition in 1998 when he became the first faculty member from KCKCC to be named Kansas Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation in 1998.

An honor usually reserved primarily for professors from such major four-year universities such as Kansas, Kansas State and Wichita State, only four of the 22 awards since 1988 were selected from community college faculties.

For many, such a prestigious honor would have been the cap to their careers but for Collins, it was the motivation to add the roles of Archeologist, Historian, and Innovator to his career that the long-time Basehor resident will end with his retirement at the end of the summer semester.

Were it not for Collins and the support of the college in preserving the Quindaro Ruins, they almost certainly would have been allowed to deteriorate completely.  A Territorial Kansas town in 1857, Quindaro was the site of a series of Underground Railroad stations in eastern Kansas.

In 2002, the First AME Church was awarded a $200,000 “Save America’s Treasures Grant” from the National Park Service to begin work preserving the Ruins located on 120 acres on river bluffs north of 27th and Sewell.  One of the stipulations of the grant was the matching of funds or in-kind services, which is where Collins and KCKCC saved the grant.

“It would have been lost were it not for the college,” said Collins, who headed a volunteer program to provide in-kind services.  “The vast amount was in sweat,” says Collins.  “Every weekend for six months we had 20 volunteers cleaning up the area – services worth $280,000 plus $175,000 from city in-kind services.”

Collins was also field project manager for the archeological and preservation phases of the grant.

Were it not for Collins, KCKCC archeology students would have never been able to experience digs in Kansas, Illinois and class tours of Anasazi sites in the deep southwest. 

“I became really fascinated with archaeology through vacation tours of the southwest with my wife, Dorothy, who is an anthropologist,” says Collins. 

In addition to taking students to excavations, the Collins spent two months in Kenya in 2001 at a paleoanthropological field school including several weeks at the Richard Leakey camp on Lake Turkana where they excavated human habitation sites dating back 1.5 million years.

And were it not for Collins, students would never have been introduced to videography that in turn led to a pilot Visual Sociology class that put the sights, sounds, and accomplishments of students on the college website. 

“We put cameras in their hands, taught them how to interview students, and edit their video concerning such subjects as ‘banned books’,  early KCK human rights activist Saturnino Alvarado, KCKCC athletic teams and others which increased KCKCC’S student presence on the Internet,” says Collins.

“Quindaro was probably my proudest accomplishment because of the community involvement,” says Collins.  “Dorothy had encouraged me to look into the Underground Railroad, and it led to my participation in preserving the Ruins.  But I’m also proud to have taken students into the community. One student group from the ‘Greening Society Learning Community’ completed a door-to-door study on curbside recycling in Basehor and then presented the report to the Basehor City Council and if the recession hadn’t hit, they were poised to adopt it.”

Collins also led an honors class in a survey of the homeless of KCK. “We found four times as many homeless as had been shown and the study helped Wyandotte Mental Health get additional funding to serve the homeless.”

Other projects included a 1990 study of latch key kids that was requested by the late Paul Jewell, leading to a local neighborhood church opening a before and after school center; a “Women at KCKCC” study that provided research which helped reinforce the need for a women’s study program at KCKCC; and a survey of a low income area in Leavenworth which was left without a grocery store and no means of transportation for those residents without cars. 

Those efforts resulted in the Leavenworth council revising bus schedules so residents could get to shopping areas.

A 1965 graduate of Northeast High School in Kansas City, Missouri where he sang in the choir, ran track and played football, Collins earned his B.A. in Sociology from UMKC in 1969, a Master’s in Social Psychology from there in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Sociology from KU in 1984. 

Collins started his KCKCC career as an adjunct instructor in 1976.

Collins’ wife, Dorothy, is an instructor of Anthropology at KCKCC and chairperson of the Adjunct Faculty Committee. 

They have four children, Michael Collins, Audio Engineering Director for the Church of the Resurrection; Christine Sanders, a sixth grade teacher at Basehor Elementary School; Jamie Walker, now completing her practicum as a second grade teacher at Heritage Elementary School in Fort Worth, Tex.; Brad Sage, a career Army NCO who has served three tours in Iraq and one each in Kosovo and Afghanistan, now stationed at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. as a Warrior Transition Specialist; and three grandchildren, Damian and Ryan Walker and Kaitlin Sanders.

A resident of Basehor since 1972 living in the New England Saltbox home he built himself, Collins may be retiring but he’s not going to stop teaching.

“I’m a better teacher than I’ve ever been but I’ve been having a lot of back pain and can’t stand very long in the classroom,” he says.  “So the first thing I’m going to do in retirement is focus on healing my back pain naturally.”

One of the three founders of the college’s on-line teaching program, the first instructor to achieve the ‘Quality Matters’ certification, and one of the most active online instructors, Collins gave impetus to on-line instruction by teaching HTML to students and then challenging them to teach two others, which became one of the recommendations cited in the Carnegie Award in 1998.

His latest interest is in KCKCC’s Learning Communities where he’s working on developing new classes for that program. 

“After 34 years, I can’t let go of teaching,” says Collins “And I want to thank the people of Wyandotte County for supporting me and allowing me to have a great career at our college.”