SEQUIM — Ground has yet to be broken on the Sequim School District’s dedicated vocational center, but it has already drawn significant interest — and a seven-figure donation.
Marylaura Ramponi of Sequim presented the Sequim School Board with $1 million on July 15 for the naming rights to the facility that will be known as The Ramponi Center for Technical Excellence.
The five-member school board unanimously agreed to accept the donation and name the facility for Ramponi and her late husband Louie.
“What a visionary decision, to see students benefit from your generosity,” school board director Patrice Johnston told Ramponi at the July 15 board meeting.
“Thank you for giving me the opportunity,” Ramponi responded.
Ramponi said she and her husband owned and operated a television store in Sonoma, Calif.; Marylaura did sales, Louie the “technical side.”
After they sold their store and home, the couple used the funds to follow their passion for travel. She said the couple visted 49 out of 50 states — “except for Rhode Island; it’s too small,” Ramponi joked — before they found their landing spot in Sequim.
“We kept returning to Sequim,” Ramponi said. “We kept coming back year after year, [saying], ‘This is where we want to live.’”
The couple invested in Sequim real estate in the 1990s and bought for themselves in the area in 1999 before immediately heading out to spend months in Alaska. Then they returned to Sequim.
Louie died in 2013.
Ramponi said she was working out how to help youngsters interested in the trades considering her family’s background. Louie, who served on the Sonoma City Council, never had a formal education.
She eventually connected with Phil Castell, retired founder of Castell Insurance in Sequim, a friend and financial adviser to Ramponi.
After developing scholarships for students to go into the trades, the pair agreed on the big contribution to the vocational center.
“We thought, ‘Let’s see if we can help somebody else,’” Ramponi said.
“The family was very thrilled to be contributing in a meaningful way,” Castell said at the school board meeting on July 15.
“She’s going to enjoy helping students while she’s with us.”
Nickels said she brought the proposal to a facilities naming committee and came away with unanimous support for Ramponi’s proposal. The district plans to work with the Olympic View Community Foundation to facilitate the donation.
“I got goosebumps,” board president Eric Pickens said of the donation.
The Sequim School District’s long-hoped-for center that failed to get funding in 2023 received nearly $5 million from state legislators in the 2024 supplemental budget.
Imagined as a $15 million to $17.5 million facility by by Ned Floeter, director of Sequim School District’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) program, the pared-down funding will support what backers are calling Phase 1: a 10,000-square-foot structure with two large bays and two or three classrooms that would serve the district’s automotive and construction classes.
In a previous interview, Floeter said he can envision this facility, what he dubs a “significant learning space,” for allowing for students to work on projects such as a cross-section of a house while students in another part of the facility work on automotive projects.
Missing from those plans is a revamped culinary arts space, but Floeter noted that “this [center] probably has multiple phases to it.”
Ramponi’s donation is particularly significant, Nickels said on July 15, because it allows the school district to begin portions of the construction phase apart from the grant funding cycle.
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Michael Dashiell is the editor of the Sequim Gazette of the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which also is composed of other Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News and Forks Forum. Reach him at michael.dashiell@sequimgazette.com.
