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Greenville Tech gets $2M gift

Ross Norton //November 29, 2018//

Greenville Tech gets $2M gift

Ross Norton //November 29, 2018//

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A Greenville Technical College graduate who credits the school for shaping her professional life and that of a friend she met on campus has made a $2 million gift to help ensure success of future students at the technical college. The school will use the funds to create a student success center named for both of them.

Dodie Anderson was honored by the school on Nov. 28, along with her classmate, professor Daniel Dreisbach of American University, with the unveiling of a new sign for a space that will be renamed the Dreisbach/Anderson Student Success Center.

Anderson was married with children when she enrolled at Greenville Tech in the late 1970s, she said during the ceremony, and even though a high school teacher told her she wasn’t college material, she wanted a degree to play a meaningful role in her husband’s plywood company, which later would become Anderson Hardwood Flooring. While in school, she became friends with Dreisbach, who was going to school by day and working nights to get by. He would become the only graduate of the South Carolina Technical College System ever to become a Rhodes Scholar. Today he is a law professor and a nationally recognized expert on First Amendment law, she said.

The building that bears the name, Dreisbach/Anderson Student Success Center, is an existing facility that will undergo renovations. Work is expected to begin in the summer 2019 and completed a year later, according to a Greenville Tech news release.

It will house enrollment services including admissions and financial aid to help students along their educational journey. It will include “anything a student needs to move forward, overcome barriers and excel, including tutoring, academic coaching, counseling, veterans support and more,” the news release said.