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Fort Lewis College receives largest donation in its history

Roberta Barr’s foundation gives $1.4M for teacher education

When Roberta Armstrong Barr died at the age of 99 in 2013, the lifelong educator had already awarded about $200,000 in 120 scholarships to aspiring teachers at Fort Lewis College and a substantial amount to Western State College.

Last week, as trustees closed out the Robert M. & Roberta Armstrong Barr Foundation, those gifts were eclipsed by large donations to both schools, Barr’s alma maters.

FLC received the largest gift from an individual in its history, $1.4 million for the Teacher Education Department.

“Mrs. Barr was determined to give back and change lives,” said Will Camp, coordinator of field experiences for the department. “Her first hope was that we would be able to identify folks who, without the money, without the encouragement of a gift, might drift away from teaching. She’d had a similar experience – she almost didn’t make it, and someone gave her a gift, and so she stayed in school.”

After graduating from Fort Lewis College with a teaching certificate when it was a two-year school in the early 1930s, Barr went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in public school administration from Western State in Gunnison. Her 40-year career in the field began with teaching at one-room schoolhouses in La Plata County, including Falfa on the Florida Mesa and Hermosa, the school where she began her own education.

“She shoveled coal and snow,” Camp wrote in a letter to the editor of The Durango Herald at the time of Barr’s death. “A story is told that she occasionally had to shoo bears away from school grounds.”

Barr would go on to teach geography, English and health at Smiley Junior High School before being appointed principal of Mason Elementary School.

“Park Elementary was deemed too small to have a principal of its own,” said Judy Michalski, former director of curriculum for Durango School District 9-R and one of two trustees of the Barr Foundation, along with Rod Humble. “And she took it on, too.”

Barr’s husband, Robert, was a farmer, rancher and beekeeper. The couple married in 1941 and had been together for more than 50 years when he died in the early 1990s.

The money will be invested along with the $25 million in endowments the Fort Lewis College Foundation manages, said Mark Jastorff, vice president for advancement at the college. Its investments are currently earning about 4 percent, Jastorff said, which will bring in between $50,000 and $60,000 annually for scholarships.

“Roberta knew how important education was,” said Gene Bradley, former chairman of the FLC Foundation Board of Directors, “and she was willing to invest in making sure the next generation of teachers had the best opportunities to be great.”

In addition to the FLC donation, the Barr Foundation is giving almost $500,000 in a similar gift to Western State College. Another $100,000 will go to the Colorado State Grange Scholarship Fund. Barr received her 65-year pin as a member of the Animas Valley Grange a few months before her death and was named Outstanding Granger by the state organization in 2009.

Everyone at Fort Lewis was excited by the gift, but perhaps none more so than President Dene Thomas.

“I cannot adequately express my gratitude to the Barr Foundation for their generosity,” Thomas said. “Roberta was a remarkable person and educator. Her service to Fort Lewis over the years has secured her a prominent place in the history of this institution.”

abutler@duangoherald.com

This story has been corrected to say the $100,000 donation from the Robert M. & Roberta Armstrong Barr Foundation was made to the Colorado State Grange Scholarship Fund.

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