School, business and community leaders came together Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the expansion of a playground at the Panther Valley Elementary School.

“This playground represents what can happen when people come together with a shared goal, creating something meaningful for our children,” Panther Valley Superintendent Dave McAndrew said at the ribbon cutting ceremony.

He thanked the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley, the Panther Valley Blueprint Community and Keel Infrastructure for their financial support and generosity.

“Partnerships like these make a lasting difference in our schools and in the lives of our students,” McAndrew said. “A playground is more than swings and slides. It’s a place where children laugh, use their imagination, build confidence and most importantly, make friendships that can last a lifetime.”

Carbon County Commissioner Michael Sofranko echoed those sentiments, giving a nod to the community for valuing its children and investing in the future.

“When any community puts their children first, that says a lot about a community,” Sofranko said. “When you put children first, you’re investing in the future.”

Capital investment

Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, partnered with the school district, investing $1 million over three years, and the playground represents a $120,000 capital investment project in the first year of that partnership, Liam Wilson, Keel COO, said before the ceremony.

“They came up with five areas where they wanted us to put funds,” he said. “The first area was a community school coordinator, acting between the home life and the student life for the kids, making sure that truancy wasn’t a problem.”

The other areas included an after-school care program, which helps parents working longer hours and kids so they could stay at school longer, he explained, and after school transportation home, which Keel also funded.

The company also provided a $60,000 discretionary fund account through Amazon, which allows teachers to provide materials for their classrooms that they traditionally paid for out of their own pockets, Wilson said.

The final area was infrastructure, or capital projects, that the company could help fund, he said, and the playground expansion was the first of those projects within the district.

The elementary school playground constructed in 2018 was literally half its current size and could only accommodate about a third of each grade level when at recess, Wilson said.

“The kids can never play together,” he said.

The company is already looking to the district as to what the next infrastructure project they want or need to tackle for the second year of the partnership, which Wilson said began before his company’s move toward building a four-building data center complex off Industrial Road in Nesquehoning.

The data center project could take three years to build, Wilson said, and is currently undergoing the municipal planning review with additional information being submitted by late June or early July.

The process is moving smoothly, he said, adding that the state, county and local officials have all been fantastic to do business with.

Need for center

Even the public coming through town meetings are seeing the need for data centers in this era, Wilson said.

“People generally came in skeptical or on the fence, and I think people generally left either supporting or at a minimum, understanding what a data center is.

“There’s a lot of rubbish out there in the media about what these things are, what they do in the environment, all the negative aspects,” Wilson said. “But people don’t realize that we use them every single day.”

Wilson pointed to online banking, watching a movie on Netflix, or even going to a hospital — all the information is going through a data center.

“It’s ironic that people come in and say, ‘Well, I just read this on AI. The data centers are bad,’” he said. “That’s using a data center to read that to us.”

Keel’s data center complex will bring 297 full-time jobs to the Panther Valley area and pay an average salary of $153,000, including benefits, Wilson said.

The company is ready to roll out programs in conjunction with Lehigh County Community College to train the area’s workforce, he said, and is also cementing the partnership with the school district for the future.

“If we want to attract the talent that we need to attract when we build the data center, we have to have a really strong, resilient school district,” Wilson said. “The playground is a token of our appreciation to the community for welcoming us in.”

Playground help

Wilson came with a group of Keel employees, many of which worked on the community build of the playground.

Dave Boyd, who is fuels manager for Keel, has three kids in the school district and brought his son, who is in 10th grade with him to work on the playground addition build.

“He was also here in third grade when they put the first playground in,” Boyd said “So, it’s kind of seeing it come full circle.”

Boyd sees the investment his employer has made in the community and giving back to young people, such as the sweatshirts all the students received at Christmastime.

“It makes you feel happy and proud that they have the stuff that we have given them and they’re using it,” he said. “It’s just been a big help.”

Wilson does see the contributions that his company makes as an investment, rather than a donation, and the company’s future is tied to the school district.

“The partnership with the Panther Valley School District has been incredibly beneficial on our side, and I speak on behalf of the Keel team here,” Wilson told those gathered.

“It’s our absolute pleasure to help with this playground. It’s the most rewarding side of what we do day to day,” he said. “We’re here for you.”

A host of community leaders joined the Keel contingent at Tuesday’s ribbon cutting, including Kylie Adams Weiss and Jared Soto from Carbon Chamber and Economic Development Corp, Lexi Merkel from Congressman Ryan MacKenzie’s office and Brad Hurley from state Sen. Dave Argall’s office.

Panther Valley School Board members Daniel Matika, Pat Leonzi, Shawn Hoben and Kim Laird, and Dr. Paula Jones, elementary principal, talked about the immeasurable value the playground investment has on her students.

“I truly cannot say thank you enough to the partners and that this playground truly reflects what can happen when a community comes together and partners come together,” she said.

“If you could see these children every day, you would see how much what you do actually matters,” Jones said.