UW-Whitewater Breaks Ground on Mary Poppe Chrisman Success Center

An addition to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater campus has been set in motion, thanks to a generous donation from an alumnus, Byron R. “Chris” Chrisman, in honor of his late wife, Mary Poppe Chrisman.

The Mary Poppe Chrisman Success Center will house the UW-Whitewater Academic Support Center, serving thousands of students with tutorial and supplemental instruction and offering employment opportunities to hundreds of qualified learning assistants, or tutors.

The 18,390 square-foot three-story addition, which broke ground in May 2016 and is expected to open in fall 2017, will connect to Laurentide Hall, offering easy access to mathematics and English faculty and staff. The highly functional and easily accessible center will provide the space, technology and programs to meet the campus’s growing demand for in-depth tutorial support.

UW-Whitewater has provided free peer-learning opportunities to its students since the mid-1960s. The Academic Support Center serves 43 percent of the current undergraduate population of 12,351 full-time students, three times as many as were served just five years ago, and provides nearly 150,000 hours of tutoring every year. Math, accounting, writing and the sciences are the subjects where the demand for tutoring is the greatest. To meet that demand, the university currently employs, trains and supervises more than 230 student learning assistants.

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