As a way of saying “thanks,” Scholastic Inc. presented Crowder College on Tuesday with a $25,000 donation.

Tom Hoekzema, senior vice president of operations at Scholastic, based out of New York, read from a letter by Dick Robinson, president and CEO of Scholastic.

“On behalf of everyone at Scholastic, along with our teacher, parent and child customers all across the country, we want to thank you for your tremendous generosity in providing space for our employees to continue working following the water damage to our facility in Neosho,” Robinson wrote. “In acknowledgement of that generosity, Scholastic is presenting you with a check $25,000 to the Crowder Foundation. We are also donating books, and reading intervention software programs to assist in the developing of a learning library for area teachers in the Crowder College library.”

The Scholastic building, located on Harmony Street, was flooded back in early April.  

“This is our largest center,” said Hoekzema. “We have 500 people working in this center. When it is fully occupied, we have 345 seats here. During those three days [we were down], we had abandoned rates, which is the measurements that you use for call centers. You know that you want to only abandon only 3-4 percent of your calls, and one of our businesses we abandoned 50 percent of our calls. So we were under stress, but we have two other call centers, but those call centers could not handle the volume on their own. So getting a temporary call center up was really very important to the company.”

The company was met with open arms by the college, as well as Empire District Electric Company and the local economic development group. The three entities set up a temporary call center at Crowder’s Longwell Museum.

“Everybody was trying to help pitch in and what they could do to help get this business back and up and running,” Hoekzema said. “It was impressive.”

Currently, there are 150 people working in the call center.

“The folks in there (addressing the call center) that are working are our folks,” Crowder College President Dr. Alan Marble said.

But the question remains: Where will the call center go?

“We are still working on where we exactly (are) going to be, but I can tell you that we want to be right here in Neosho,” Hoekzema said. “We have to have the new facility up and running by Aug. 1.”