Rivesville High alum continues to help enhance learning environment for kids | Local News | timeswv.com

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RIVESVILLE — Rivesville Elementary-Middle School sixth grader Emma Gouty, of Fairmont, knows cool when she sees it.

She is just one of many students who are excited about the new flooring in the lower level of her school.

“It’s cool because it’s marble and multiple colors,” she said. “We have a sidewalk, and it really helped us when for rainy days, when the grass is wet.”

On Friday, REMS students joined faculty, staff and Principal Tyson Furgason on the school’s front lawn to thank the school’s benefactor, Rick Parker who funded the new flooring and, in previous years, a new sidewalk.

Parker has lived in Cleveland, Ohio since he was 18 having moved there after his graduation from Rivesville High School in 1965. For years, he and his wife have been helping REMS with various projects to enhance the learning experience in the school that was built in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration.

“All I did at school was play baseball, football, and then I got a job there in 1965 at 18 at Ford,” Parker said. “So I worked at Ford and ran an asphalt and concrete business at the same time, so I didn’t see my wife that much, but, I always wanted to give back to the school, you know.”

In recent years, Parker via the Rick and Karen Parker Foundation have funded the construction of two campus pavilions, a canopy, and concrete walkways. His most recent donation of $15,000 funded the epoxy coating and painting of the floor in the bottom of the school.

Johnny Uveges, 74, of Rivesville, is a 1969 graduate of the Rivesville High School. He describes himself as the school’s volunteer construction manager and has been coordinating projects with Furgason and Parker for years since he returned back to West Virginia after living in Sarasota, Florida.

Uveges said Parker never forgot his hometown.

“Anytime you remember where you come from and you do good in life, and you come back to your community and donate this and do all this work, it’s amazing, because it’s hard to find people like that now, you know, I mean, and he’s the best,” Uveges said. “I mean, yeah, he’ll say, ‘let’s do something at school. Go look for something.’ He’s in the front, price it, and I’ll do a takeoff on it, and I go price it everywhere.”

Furgason said the original concrete flooring was “not in horrible shape,” he just wanted to enhance the environment for the students.

“Our maintenance department does a great job of tending to our day to day needs and small projects and things, but when you have somebody like Mr. Parker that’s unwavering with his dedication and support to us, it helps with bigger projects,” Furgason said. “It just was an old concrete floor. It had pockmarks in it. No matter how much we cleaned it, painted it, it would still look dirty. So we wanted to do something that was colorful, unique, neat for the kids, neat for our school.”

Over the summer, Furgason had workers come in to began by grinding the floor down. Then, they put a coating on it. Then, there was the painting. They wanted to include red in some manner because it is one of the school’s colors.

“I think there’s one or two coatings, then they do the painting, and then they cover it with epoxy coating. And you can take a hammer and beat on that, and it’s not going to mess it up,” he said.

And like Emma, her classmate Camden Heldreth, of Rivesville, is thankful for all the help Parker has done for his school.

“It’s just nice because we have somebody to watch out for us and make sure we’re being safe and stuff,” Camden said.

Reach Eric Cravey at 304-367-2523.

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