CANYON, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) — Officers with West Texas A&M College (WTAMU) introduced Monday that the Schooling Constructing on the college’s Canyon campus will now go by a brand new title after a large donation to the college.
Based on a information launch from the college, West Texas A&M College’s training constructing will now be referred to as the Geneva Schaeffer Schooling Constructing. This comes after the Schaeffer household donated $2.5 million to WTAMU to assist reestablish the constructing’s impression on the Canyon campus. That is the primary donor title to be related to this constructing.
Schaeffer, who died in 2016, attended each WTAMU in addition to the demonstration faculty beforehand housed within the training constructing. After graduating in 1955, Schaeffer was a public faculty trainer for 17 years. She acquired an honorary doctorate of philosophy within the college’s School of Schooling and Social Sciences in 2016.
“That is the end result of a 20-plus-year dream Geneva and I shared,” Stanley Schaeffer, Geneva Schaeffer’s husband, mentioned within the launch. “Each of us, like many different alumni who attended courses in that constructing, had been unhappy when it closed and have needed to see it actively in use once more ever since.”
After renovations to the constructing are full, the constructing might be occupied by the college’s graduate faculty in addition to an tutorial design house “to advance digital studying.” The Geneva Schaeffer Schooling Constructing will even function workplace house for the coed help and success departments. It’s going to additionally present round 60,000 sq. ft of extra studying and workplace areas, together with three full flooring and half of the constructing’s basement.
“The Schaeffer household has been deeply invested within the progress and imaginative and prescient of WT for greater than 4 many years,” WT President Walter Wendler mentioned within the launch. “Geneva was a robust power for a lot of the transformative modifications which have taken place at WT since she and Stanley started partaking others to affix them to help the College. Having her title on the Schooling Constructing is an affidavit to her life-long dedication to training throughout the Panhandle.”
Based on the discharge, the constructing now referred to as the Geneva Schaeffer Schooling Constructing was the second educational corridor constructed on the Canyon campus. It formally opened in October 1928, initially beginning as an indication faculty. Courses had been hosted within the constructing till 1988.
Officers consider that this can assist the college with its graduate faculty, in addition to distance studying, sooner or later, the discharge mentioned.
“It’s time to push for the following degree of on-line instruction,” Neil Terry, the provost and govt vice chairman of educational affairs at West Texas A&M College, mentioned within the launch. “The brand new facility will embody a single location providing all kinds of on-line help companies to school and college students; devoted lecture rooms and personal rooms that can facilitate digital content material; an innovation lab for rising expertise within the academic surroundings, together with gamification, digital actuality, and augmented actuality. Very similar to the late ’90s, it’s arduous to understand how expertise will change and the place we’ll find yourself 25 years from now. The brand new facility will assist form the way forward for on-line training.”