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NORTHERN VIRGINIA DAILY Free for the taking Avtex donates laboratory glassware to schools By Jonathon Shacat Fourteen Warren County teachers were busy Thursday cleaning thousands of pieces of unused, high quality laboratory glassware at the Avtex Fibers site in Front Royal. The items- ranging from beakers to test tubes and from flasks to graduated cylinders- are free for the taking, and teachers from the county's middle school, junior high and high school are planning to put them to good use in the classroom. "The schools will benefit from the donation of what would be rather expensive equipment, and the children will hold the Avtex legacy in their hands," Ron Mabry, chairman of the Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority said in a press release. Avtex once manufactured rayon that was used in parachute cording, missile nose cones and space flight-suits, according to Marla Taylor Jones, marketing director for the EDA. In 1989, the site was shut down due to environmental violations, and it soon became the largest Superfund site in Virginia, she added, noting that the EDA now owns the property, which is being prepared for redevelopment. About $150,000 worth of laboratory equipment was salvaged from the site, according to Ed Thorsett, executive director of the Shenandoah Center for Heritage and the Environment at Front Royal, which is charged with preserving historic artifacts from the site. However, not all of the glassware items are appropriate for use by schools, he added. "Some of it is just too advanced, very specialized equipment," he said. "It is little beyond what can be used in a high school classroom." Thorsett estimated that the value of the items donated to the schools is between $80,000 and $100,000. Lee Davis, and eighth-grade physical science teacher at Warren County Junior High School, is looking forward to using the new materials in her classes. "Kids are hard on glassware," she said, standing beside boxes of beakers and flasks at the Avtex site. "It's nice to have enough sets of things... Instead of having one for every four to six kids, we can work in pairs or alone." She hopes that by using the new glassware, her pupils will interact better during science experiments. "The verbalization that goes on should be about solving the problem, not who gets to use the equipment," she said. The donation of the laboratory items to the schools is the first in a series of missions that the Shenandoah Center for Heritage and the Environment has planned. "We wanted to let the school system take what it needs,"
said Thorsett. In the future, the group plans to exhibit the remaining glassware items in a museum, he said. It also wants to educate the public about sustainable development and environmental concerns, and even to build a nature park for the community. |