News Release
February 1999
Moravian College announced that the R. K. Laros Foundation
has recently awarded the college $100,000 to expand the Collier Hall
of Science to accommodate the new nursing program and its faculty. In
addition, the George I. Alden Trust recently awarded a grant of $75,000
to Moravian for the purpose of upgrading two existing lecture halls
by providing multi-media and computer capabilities.
Construction of the offices for the St. Luke’s Commemorative
School of Nursing at Moravian College is already underway and is scheduled
to be completed by March. Built in 1971 and renamed in honor of past
Moravian College president Herman E. Collier, Jr., the Hall of Science
is the heart of scientific activity at Moravian. Collier Hall houses
the departments of biology, chemistry, computer science, and physics
and earth science. The facility encompasses the campus’s principal
lecture hall, a secondary lecture hall, and all the classrooms, laboratories,
and staff and faculty offices used by these four departments.
The nursing program will be fully launched by the fall
of 1999, with an anticipated 30 full-time enrollees plus five full-time
equivalent (FTE) students within our Division of Continuing Studies.
The office suite will include the office of the Nursing Program Chair,
Janet Sipple, R.N., Ed.D., as well as a shared group office for the
other faculty in the program. The group office will contain three workstations
and will be used as satellite office space for those professors whose
primary offices are at St. Luke’s Hospital.
The grant from the George I. Alden Trust will support
retrofitting classroom 302 in Memorial Hall. A portion of the funds
will be used to install a high-resolution video projector; speaker’s
lectern, including personal computers for both Macintosh and Windows
operating systems; a visual presenter (overhead camera-projector); accessories;
and associated engineering, installation, wiring and cabling costs.
With this upgrade, the Memorial 302 classroom would become a multimedia
facility comparable to the newly renovated Dana Lecture Hall. The George
I. Alden Trust grant will also support upgrading classroom 101 in Comenius
Hall into a new computer classroom.
Moravian College president, Dr. Ervin J. Rokke, said,
"Moravian is committed to providing more hands-on opportunities
for students of every discipline to become skillful with advanced technologies,
especially those technologies that are computer-based." This philosophy
has evolved during the past several years and is reflected in the construction
of a large student computer laboratory in Monocacy Hall (available to
students 24 hours a day), upgrades to Moravian’s computer graphic
design studio, and the installation of two computer classrooms. "While
we are proud of our progress to date, we must continue to improve students’
accessibility to computers, both in student labs and in the classroom
settings, and The George I. Alden Trust grant helps us keep moving in
that direction," Rokke said.
The R.K. Laros Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable
trust, established by Mr. and Mrs. Russell K. Laros for the purpose
of financially supporting outreach organizations. The Laros family is
tied to the Bethlehem community through the former Laros Textile Company
and the many people the company employed.
The George I. Alden Trust is located in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Established in 1912, the trust supports educational institutions that
demonstrate a strong combination of educational excellence with efficient
and economical administration.
