In front of the Memorial Tower with the sun beaming down, BP America presented a $500,000 check Wednesday to the Forever LSU campaign for a joint education project between the LSU College of Education and Advance Baton Rouge. “Today we are more than halfway to the goal of $750 million by the end of 2010,” said Rusty Jabour, vice chancellor of Communications and University Relations. “The total today is about $430 million, and we are very honored to add to that total today.” BP America, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, gave the donation to support the development of two college preparatory high schools in the area. One of the high schools will focus on digital arts and media, and the other will focus on math and sciences. “The new digital arts/media-focused school will help the city and state by creating a pipeline of highly-skilled talent for high-tech, ‘high income’ jobs associated with the international motion picture and digital media industry,” Jeff Hale, LSU assistant vice chancellor for Corporate, Foundation and Research Relations said in a news release. “When you combine this new cutting-edge high school with similar efforts under way at LSU to hire distinguished faculty and establish courses in relevant areas of digital arts and media … the very positive implications become apparent.” Hale said the new school will complement efforts to develop “home-grown talent.” University acting Chancellor William Jenkins said the recently established digital arts and media school “will bring top faculty talent from several disciplines to LSU while also bolstering the recruitment of top-caliber undergraduate and graduate students to our state.” “The Forever LSU campaign’s success is a result of our corporate and alumni donors and friends making a commitment to progress,” Jenkins said. Bob Malone, chairman and president of BP America, said they believe these new schools are going to give hundreds of Baton Rouge children a better opportunity to succeed in the classroom and, more importantly, in life. Malone gave two reasons for BP America’s donation. LSU is an important part of BP and many of our workers graduated from the University, Malone said. Equally as important is that 50 percent of BP America’s work force will reach retirement in the next 10 years, Malone said. “We are going to need literally tens of thousands of engineers, mathematicians, geo-scientists, and right now our schools and universities aren’t producing enough of them,” Malone said. Malone said he is proud to give a gift that will support educational research, teacher training and the development of new courses and teaching materials. Jenkins said the University has to be engaged in educating K-12 grades.
—-Contact Joy Lukachick at [email protected]