Rehoboth fetes 100-years with new facility

Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff Writer

REHOBOTH — This community not only celebrated its centennial this weekend, it also celebrated the donation of $1.5 million that will help launch the Rehoboth school into the next century.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held Sunday afternoon to celebrate the construction of a new Rehoboth Christian School facility, which will house a school media and technology center, to be named the Navajo Code Talkers Communications Center, and a new middle school. The building is being added to the west side of the elementary school.

According to Ron Polinder, the school's executive director, the $3 million project recently received a large boost with the donation of two substantial gifts. The Richard and Helen De Vos Foundation of Michigan donated $1 million to the project and the Elizabeth I. Huizenga Foundation of Illinois donated $500,000.

Peter Huizenga represented his family's foundation at Sunday's groundbreaking. In a phone interview with the Independent, Huizenga said his family has had some knowledge about Rehoboth throughout the years. When he was a boy, he explained, his Sunday School classes would take up collections to help the school. One of his former church pastors moved here to serve at the Rehoboth Church, he added, and he attended college with Edward T. Begay, the former Navajo Nation Council Speaker, for one semester.

Huizenga said his family members decided to combine their desire to help the school with his sister's interest in honoring the Navajo Code Talkers by donating funds to help establish the communication center and requesting the facility be named after the Navajo World War II heroes.

Doug Evilsizor, the school's Director of Development, said school officials thought naming the center, which will feature a library and a state-of-the-art computer lab, after the Code Talkers would be appropriate since the Navajo Marines served the United States through their use of communication.

Once constructed, the center will also house an after school program for students from Rehoboth and Church Rock Academy, which will be funded by a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant.

In addition to its most recent $1 million gift, the De Vos Foundation has made previous donations to the school, said Polinder. He described both foundation gifts as a "boost and a blessing" to the school.

"We're just thrilled with both of them," he said. "These kinds of gifts can propel us ... ," he added, "into a new phase of our history."

According to Polinder and Evilsizor, the new middle school and communications center are part of the Rehoboth Christian School New Century Campaign, a four-year, $6.5 million capital project that also includes building a practice gym and establishing an endowment fund to support the operational costs of the new facilities and support expanded and improved school programming.

Construction of the new facility is the first step of a long-range master plan, said Evilsizor, to replace many of the school's aging buildings and to improve its educational programs. School officials are currently working with a number of donors to finalize additional financial gifts to the project, he added, and are looking for additional partners, locally and nationally, who want to help make Rehoboth's education available in the community.

The new middle school and communications center are much needed facilities, he said.

"It was 10 years ago that we redesigned our mid-school program," he explained, "but we've never had a facility to support that program."

Currently, the middle school is "crammed" into a wing of the high school, he said.

Carol Bremer-Bennett, the middle school's head teacher, said the new building's design will facilitate the school's curriculum design. One of its features, she said, is a big open space, large enough for the all the students and staff to meet together.

Middle schools operate like a family, she said, and they need such a space to "gather as a whole community" to share times of discussion, celebration and sorrow.

In addition to the open space, the building will feature a number of small nooks and break-out rooms for students to meet and work in smaller groups. The design has a "welcoming" feel, she said, one that proclaims "kids live here."

The building will also include southwestern and Native American-inspired design elements, she added. The building's designers walked through Zuni Pueblo, she explained, and recreated some of the Pueblo's "village feel" through the room design and through the kiva-shaped technology lab. In addition, she said, they incorporated traditional Navajo ideas about specific activities tied to cardinal directions when deciding where the entrance, classrooms, computer center, and library would be located.

"This will truly be a model middle school for the region," said Evilsizor.

The new facility is scheduled to be completed by the beginning of the 2004-05 school year