Richard D. Brown Scholarship

"An only child who was once more than a little shy," is the way Richard D. Brown reflects on his childhood, growing up in the Miller Park neighborhood of North Omaha--actually his parents lived for 56 years in the same house three blocks east of the 30th & Fort MCC campus--which had served as a military base until the early 1970s. Brown attended Miller Park Elementary, McMillan Junior High, and Omaha North before embarking on college--an experience at UNO that included 160 undergraduate hours as a secondary education major, and he was told, as that school's first College of Education graduate to earn credentials in three subjects: history, journalism and speech. He later added an across-the-board social studies endorsement to his quiver.

He spent 36 years as a social studies/language arts faculty member at Millard South where he won numerous national and state teaching awards, including the first Nebraskan to be included in USA Today's All-USA Teaching Team. His 1997 speech squad won the school's first Nebraska School Activities Association team sweepstakes championship. Following his Millard retirement in 2009, Brown took a part-time coaching position at Creighton Prep where in 2014 one of his boys became the first Nebraskan to win Student of the Year honors from the Des Moines-based National Speech & Debate Association.

Brown also taught at MCC for about 20 years. Many of his U.S. History and American Government classes were at FOC, but he also enjoyed teaching at the South Omaha campus, Elkhorn Valley, and on occasion, at the LaVista and Fremont campuses. During an enrollment surge some 20 years ago, MCC also had evening classes scheduled in classrooms at more than a dozen high schools. At Papillion-LaVista High in the early 1990s he remembers while students were writing their exam, an occasional click would come from the teacher's desk-top computer. Welcome to incoming email!

Before his full-time hiring by Millard South, Brown had embarked on a freelance writing career with stories appearing regularly in the Omaha Sun Newspapers and the Douglas County Gazette. In 1975 with the introduction of the independently-owned Midlands Business Journal, Brown became a regular writer/photographer contributing at least one story in each weekly edition. Over more than 45 years, he estimates he interviewed some 3,500 area business owners and executives including nationally-known speakers and politicians. Many were achieving great success with their entrepreneurial ventures, but there was one common denominator that challenged competitiveness and growth: a dire shortage of trained workers in the trades. One area manufacturing company president told Brown in a Friday afternoon interview that at least 50 welding positions remained unfilled at their sprawling facility. Other stories on public and private training partnerships, rural manufacturers "adopting" area vocational ed students by supplying technology to the classrooms, and local industry partnering with community colleges to finance and train future employees.

In 1972 right out of UNO, Brown taught GED Prep at the Bryant Community Center in Near North Omaha. It was administered by Omaha Technical Community College, one of several entities that would be transitioned two years later into Metro Tech, now MCC. While the Brown scholarship is a starter, it is hoped that it can generate additional interest in the welding, automotive repair, construction and related trades programs.