With more students than ever, Oklahoma City University’s nursing school builds on its success.
Diagnosis: overcrowding. Cure: expansion.
While summer break continues on the campus of Oklahoma City University, so does construction of a new, three-story building to connect with the current Kramer School of Nursing and more than triple its size. The cramped faculty and staff can’t wait to move in
“Right now, we are making space where we can find it, all over campus,” says Marvel Williamson, dean of the Kramer School of Nursing. “For classrooms, we’ve got facilities that weren’t intended to be classrooms. We have faculty and staff doubling up on offices. … It’s kind of like a lab experiment, where you see how many mice you can stuff in a cage before they start fighting each other. We’re really resisting the temptation to do that.”
All kidding aside, Williamson says the school has been experiencing growing pains for quite some time, seeing enrollment increases for 18 consecutive semesters. (In 2001, Kramer had 72 students and one program; today, it has around 300 students and eight programs.) She attributes the recent rise partly to the nation’s economic recession, which sent many scurrying for more in-demand jobs. One such golden opportunity exists for nurses, as a shortage in America threatens not to have enough to care for baby boomers on the cusp of retirement.
Whereas most nursing schools cap their enrollment numbers, Williamson says OCU has a different philosophy.
“We’re a very service-oriented institution,” she says. “One of the aspects of our mission is to meet the needs of the community, so we have done whatever we could to accommodate the demand for spots in nursing programs.”
But it’s not that easy. She says the school outgrew its existing 16,000-square-foot facility four years ago. Fundraising efforts began stat. With $7 million in hand, ground broke on the new site last October.
Although spring 2011 students will be the first class to gain knowledge in the new, 50,000-square-foot building after construction is completed in January, the third floor will remain unfinished and unused until an additional $1.5 million can be secured. Wynn Construction is the builder; the architect was Frankfurt Short Bruza.
Williamson says the current building will be retained and connect to the new one, which is “pretty much just more of the same: more classrooms, more offices, more nursing skills labs, another student lounge, more seminar rooms. … The one thing that I’m looking forward to is the opportunity for everybody to have his or her own office, and for students not to be shoulder-to-shoulder.”
