NEW BBCC president 'impressed' on first visit

MOSES LAKE - New Big Bend Community College President Terry Leas said his first impressions of the college have left him "very much impressed."

The Board of Trustees offered Leas a contract on Monday. He will be the seventh president in the college's 50-year history and will replace Bill Bonaudi. Bonaudi has been president for 17 years; he announced his retirement in February.

Leas said he attended a trustee study session Thursday and liked what he heard. "There's a passion for excellence in teaching and learning here," he said. "Tremendous pride."

Leas said in an earlier interview that his first task will be asking professors, students and district patrons their impressions of the college, its strengths and weaknesses and where it should go in the future. Leas said Big Bend's rural setting was an attraction; it's easier to get to know students, faculty and staff in a smaller town, he said.

Leas served as president of Riverland Community College in Minnesota for nine years, and was an administrator at Yakima Valley Community College for 13 years prior to that.

Leas said he was born in Detroit, but his father's Air Force career took the family from Wisconsin to Alaska to South Carolina to Ohio to Germany. "I think we were in Detroit for about two weeks," he said. When his father retired the family settled in Florida, he said, and he graduated from Florida State University. (His phone's ringtone is the Florida State Seminole war chant, he said.)

After nine years as a middle school teacher in Thomasville, Georgia, Leas said he worked on a grant program for a private Georgia college, which got him into administration. He obtained a doctorate and was hired at Yakima Valley, he said, and went from there to Riverland.

"The icing on the cake for us" of the move back to Washington is that both the couple's daughters live in the Pacific Northwest, one in Quincy, one in Lewiston, Idaho.