Left to right: Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, Gov. Martin O’Malley, student body president Olukemi Onigbinde, college president Brian Johnson, and an unnamed administrator.
Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) cruised through South Silver Spring Thursday to drop off a $1.3 million check to Montgomery College.
The money — an oversized check presented to the college’s president — covers some of the tab for a new cultural arts center on the Silver Spring/Takoma Park campus.
“We worked very hard this session by investing in higher education,” O’Malley told a festive crowd of students, faculty and community leaders.
“When we make it possible for anyone to go to college, we make our state stronger,” he said.
The cultural arts center is the last step in the campus’s $143 million expansion. Scheduled to open in 2009, the center will house two performance spaces: a 500-seat auditorium and a 120-seat black-box theater.
The Silver Spring/Takoma Park campus had long been the only site in the Montgomery College system without an auditorium, said Brian Johnson, the college’s president.
“The students on this campus, once served by the least adequate facilities, now have a state-of-the-art campus,” Johnson told the crowd.
The South Silver Spring extension also has a health science building on Georgia Avenue, which opened in 2004. A visual art center, housed in a renovated Giant bakery along East-West Highway, is scheduled to open this year.
Photo by Jennifer Deseo for The Silver Spring Penguin.
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[...] arts center off Georgia Avenue. They also hit up the state for $1.3 million for the college’s cultural arts center, under construction at Georgia and Burlington [...]