INSTITUTE - Piles of cardboard boxes fill the former research lab on West Virginia State University's campus, where the school has collected a smorgasbord of science donations for flood-damaged Mountain State schools.
Standing amid the cache Friday, chemistry professor Micheal Fultz said he didn't know exactly how much all the boxes' contents were worth, but said it's in the tens of thousands of dollars. And more donations were still coming.
Fultz said he's received Spec 20s for Advanced Placement Chemistry experiments, air diffusers, glassware, drying ovens for glassware, stir plates, shelving, gloves, safety glasses, aprons, geology kits and environmental science study kits, and microscopes will be coming in, too. Among other items, he said the donations also include 10 analytical balances - which can cost over $2,000 each - that students can use to weigh material.
The donations will go to at least three schools: Elkview Middle and Herbert Hoover High in Kanawha County and Richwood Middle in Nicholas County. He's reached out to other schools but hasn't yet heard back about all their needs.
Fultz said he personally knows many K-12 science teachers through events WVSU hosts, like the Science Bowl, and when he checked in on those who lived in flooded areas, they started talking about their destroyed labs. Through the local American Chemical Society chapter, the Bioscience Association of West Virginia and the Chemical Alliance Zone, he started getting the word out about the need for donations.
Fultz said the donors have included WVSU alumni, Marshall University, Dow, Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Preiser Scientific, science equipment distributor VWR and others, including some who wish to remain anonymous. He said Preiser contacted some national distributors that pitched in.
"It's just what people understand," Fultz said of the donations. "I understand science, that's where I can help. The people who donated understand science, that's where they can help,"
"This is our home and community, these schools are our schools, so immediately after the flood our employees got involved in the recovery effort," said Jason Lankford, West Virginia Operations site director for Dow.
Much of Hoover got more than 6 feet of water in the late-June flooding, and Fultz said four science labs there were "completely totaled." Hoover students are currently sharing the Elkview Middle building with that school's students until portable classrooms are set up and, eventually, the Kanawha public school system follows through with its promise to build a new Hoover.
Nicholas County's school system plans to put students from Richwood Middle, where damage is estimated to equal 100 percent or more of the school's appraised value, in Cherry River Elementary.
On Friday, Fultz also gave a roughly $2,000 check from members of the local American Chemical Society chapter to Vanessa Brown, principal of Clendenin Elementary, another Kanawha school that the local school district says won't reopen due to flood damage.
He said Brown can use the money on whatever her staff and students need. Clendenin Elementary kids, whom the WVSU student section of the American Chemical Society has taught science to in the past, are attending Bridge Elementary until portable classrooms can be set up for them and, eventually, a new school can be built.
"These students are our students, as a state, as a community, and we need to help support the schools, with whatever we can do," Fultz said. "... Without students going into the STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] fields, the science fields, it's going to be very hard to get them to go into the science fields at college. If we're not graduating science people, then how are we going to diversify our future economy to help it grow?"
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