Preston Co. Donates Textbooks to Library

Thanks to a gift made possible by Preston County Superintendent of Schools John Lofink, student teachers at Fairmont State University now have direct access to many of the textbooks used in West Virginia public schools.

The gift also means that the FSU School of Education, in conjunction with the Libraries of Fairmont State, is now on its way to establishing an Education Resource Center to serve students, faculty and staff, as well as the community.

The collection of K-12 textbooks contains hundreds of volumes of teaching materials, including leveled reading books, math manipulatives and geography game kits, all of which correspond to West Virginia CSOs (Content Standards and Objectives). The Ruth Ann Musick Library plans to have the materials available for students to use this fall, said Amy Hughes, Coordinator of the Library Science Program.

"We all agree that this is something our education students need to have when they begin student teaching," Hughes said. "This is an enormous gift and we are thrilled to have these resources for our students."

The collection represents most of the state adopted textbooks currently in use in West Virginia, said Dr. Van Dempsey, Dean of the School of Education. A number of teacher's editions and guides to lesson planning are also included in the volume of material, which the Preston County school system acquired as samples.

Lofink said the idea to donate the books to Fairmont State originated almost by accident. The county school superintendent was visiting the university's main campus with his daughter, who will be attending Fairmont State, when he happened to talk to Dempsey. He noted that quite a few Preston County teachers are graduates of Fairmont State.

"I'd always thought there had to be a good use for these materials and I assumed that the colleges and universities all had these. We had been storing all of the adoption samples in one room under the board office," Lofink said.

"There is a wealth of good teaching ideas in these books and they are a great beginning source of information for people starting in education. I hope this is of value to them."

Dempsey said, for elementary education student teachers, it is particularly helpful to have textbooks covering each subject area together in one place for reference purposes.

FSU student Cory Colley, who will be student teaching this fall, agreed that the collection will help him to develop lessons for elementary students in the various subject areas.

Dempsey said he finds the history textbooks to be up to date by any standards.

"If you can pull a history book off the shelf and it has 9/11 and its aftermath in it 'that is up to date,'" Dempsey said.