National Land & Range Judging Contest 2011 Honoree Dianne Ireton

Dianne Ireton

Dianne Ireton was recognized as 2011 Contest Honoree at the National Land and Range Judging Contest on May 5, 2011. Dianne is the systems coordinator for the Oklahoma Conservation Commission’s Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program. Soon after joining OCC in the fall of 1986, she started helping at the very next National Land & Range Judging Contest in May 1987, as one of approximately 200 tabulators hand grading contest score cards.

In the 6o years of the contest, the times have changed in many ways. Especially in the 25 years of Dianne’s personal experience with the contest, those changes have come at an increasingly rapid pace as the world entered first the age of computers, then the World Wide Web, then cellular and now “smart” phones. Tabulation and results have gone from handwritten to typewriters to computers, and today almost every student carries a cell phone, some of which are capable of containing applications that could provide an unfair advantage during the contest.

As Dianne’s involvement with the contest has grown, she has gained more responsibility and has helped with modernizing several aspects of the contest as times have changed. In 1999 she took over coordinating adult contest tabulation and compiling results from the entire contest and formatting them for the awards to be presented at the Awards Banquet. In 2005 she streamlined and modernized contest registration by moving to the registration site the location for making corrections and entering new registrations with the use of portable computers and printers. Previously, corrections and new registration information were taken back to the office where they were prepared and then carried back to the contest registration site. This modernization has speeded up the registration process and greatly improved its efficiency. More recently Dianne played a role in addressing rules about the use of electronic devices by participants during the contest.

Dianne also modernized contest processes by developing a system in which name tags, contest certificates and registration packets could all be produced from one database instead of separate databases for each category of product.

In addition, Dianne creates all the signs for the contest including sponsorship signs, group leader signs, field signs and parking signs.

Dianne said that time preparing for and during the National Land & Range Judging Contest is one of the busiest and most stressful times of her year. But she speaks for all the annually-returning volunteers when she says, “If we didn’t enjoy it and believe we are doing something good for the young people of America, we wouldn’t keep coming back.”

Dianne and her husband Roy live in Choctaw and have two grown sons.