Aug 28, 2021
ROTARY DONATES DESKS TO BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB
The Shepherdstown Rotary Club has donated 25 specially built, compact, portable desks to the Boys and Girls Club of the Eastern Panhandle.
The desks were delivered to the Boys and Girl's Club's brand-new Morgan County facility in Berkeley Springs on Friday, August 27. Ten of the desks will remain there for use in that facility, and five will be given to individual children who are members of that facility for use in their homes. The remaining ten have been transshipped to the Boys and Girls Club facility in Martinsburg.
The desks were delivered by three Shepherdstown Rotary Club members: Cara Keys, who chairs the Club's Youth Service Committee; Walt Eifert, who organized and supervised the construction of the desks; and Rick Caruso, the Club's Secretary, who helped spearhead the desk project.
The accompanying photo shows three children who are Morgan County Boys and Girls Club members seated at the desks, with the following adults standing in the rear: Eifert; Keys; Stacie Rohn, the CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of the Eastern Panhandle, who is also a member of the Berkeley Springs Rotary Club; Caruso; and Steve Verkouteren, the parent of two of the children.
The Shepherdstown Rotary Club has built a total of 94 of these desks. Based on a design developed by an interfaith charitable organization called DreamBuilders in Howard County MD, they were originally intended for use by children who could only attend school remotely during the Covid pandemic. However, because the desks are easy to store and move around, they remain useful for organizations that have ongoing space and resource constraints, and for disadvantaged children who have no place of their own at home to do schoolwork.
The Shepherdstown Rotary Club donated another 20 of the desks to the Shepherdstown Day Care Center in July and it has given 45 to the Jefferson County school system, for distribution to students who need them for home use. The final four will be auctioned off by the Shepherdstown Rotary Club at the Club's annual Holiday Gala in December to raise funds for the Club's youth activities.