Jul 13, 2023
SHEPHERDSTOWN ROTARY DONATES DESKS TO BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB
The Shepherdstown Rotary Club has donated 17 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 Executive Director, Stacie Rohn, on July 5. They will be distributed among the Boys and Girls Club facilities in Charles Town, Martinsburg, and Berkeley Springs, and from there given to students who need a decent place in their homes to do their schoolwork.
The desks were delivered by Shepherdstown Rotary Club Vice President Cara Keys and Club member Walt Eifert, who organized and supervised the construction of the desks.
The accompanying photo shows Keys and then Rohn, left, and Eifert right, with his grandson Aiden next to him.
The Shepherdstown Rotary Club has now built and donated more than 125 of these desks since it began constructing them in 2020. 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 very useful for both institutional and home use.
The Shepherdstown Rotary Club has previously donated 25 of the desks to the Boys and Girls Club, and it has also donated desks to the Shepherdstown Day Care Center and the Jefferson County school system.
More than 30 volunteers from Rotary, the community, and the Rotary-sponsored Interact Club at Jefferson High School have been involved in constructing the desks. The Rotary Club has covered the cost of materials with its own funds. That cost—which has fluctuated along with lumber prices—is estimated to have averaged about $50 per desk.