By Liz Beavers
lbeavers@newstribune.info
managing editor
KEYSER — For several weeks through the summer, members of the AmeriCorps Energy Express program spend their mornings helping youngsters from throughout the county develop their reading skills.
When those youngsters go home for the day, however, the AmeriCorps workers simply switch gears to another project, trading their books, pencils and crayons for paint scrapers, hammers and electric sanders.
As a requirement for the AmeriCorps program, the Energy Express mentors must choose a community service project and this year's crew chose Alleghany Mountain House.
“I had heard that they were trying to make this into a halfway house,” worker Chelsea Lewis said Wednesday as she stood inside the former Alkire Mansion.
Lewis posed the idea to her fellow AmeriCorps members, and “we all thought it was a good idea,”
said volunteer coordinator Sean Redman.
The 16 members, who represent the Energy Express sites at Keyser Primary-Middle School, had spent approximately 20 hours each working at the old mansion as of Wednesday.
“We've scraped, sanded, painted, took out windows, removed wallpaper, and even taken out toilets,” Redman said.
This week, they were working in tandem with the members of a church work team from Medina, Ohio, who had also chosen Allegheny Mountain House as one of the recipients of their mission work.
The AmeriCorps workers, however, will cap off their service project on Saturday, when they will station themselves in the parking lot of Keyser's Dollar Tree to accept donations of furniture, computers, office supplies, or anything which could be used to set up the facility for substance abusers.
“We're going to make up fliers and take them all around town to let people know what we're doing,” Redman said.
Anyone wishing to donate items may bring them to the Dollar Tree between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Saturday. The AmeriCorps workers will then transport the donated items to Mill Meadow.
