Donald Deever is the new UNR Extension Educator in Lincoln County.
Deever comes to Caliente from Searchlight. He replaces Holly Gatzke, who took another position in 2019 with UNR in Reno after many years with the cooperative extension service in Lincoln County.
Deever holds a PhD from UNLV in the field of career and technical and postsecondary education (workforce development), with additional PhD majors in writing literacy and educational technology/software development.
He spent a number of years working as an instructor at Vo-Tech in Las Vegas, now the Southeast Career and Technical Academy.
Deever has highly varied experience including botanical/horticultural expertise, serving as a tourism and travel teacher and writer and being an internationally published photojournalist. He is also a National Geographic adventurer, a documentary scriptwriter and a production assistant.
In addition, he has taught college classes in education (mostly in California), was a high school teacher on a number of subjects and also is a certified flight instructor.
He has lectured on book publishing at conferences in New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, and at one time was a park ranger/naturalist with the U.S. Park Service, as well as at Hoover Dam.
As to applying for the position of cooperative extension agent, Deever said, “I have always been interested in agriculture, have never left those roots. Still involved in a lot of research on various subjects. I felt that being in the extension service would be more to my interests than continuing teaching career and technical and postsecondary education.”
Deever came on board in Lincoln County Dec. 1. “The fact that this office is connected with workforce education is very much in keeping with my experience in career and technical education.”
Currently, a big focus at the office is radon awareness in the county. The Record ran Deever’s article on that in last week’s issue.
Also working at the extension office are Keith Larsen, Cindy Higbee and Donna Jones.
Deever said one of his major goals as the county extension agent is “to improve the economy of Lincoln County, improve the lifestyle of the people that live here and accomplish both without compromising the integrity of what makes Lincoln County a place that people love to live in.”
