Enrollment rises while nursing school fills

A PowerPoint presentation by Nancy Langston, School of Nursing dean, highlighted the need for constructing a new nursing school building at the latest VCU Board of Visitors meeting.

VCU’s fall enrollment statistics and the chartered university initiative headed for the 2005 Virginia General Assembly session also were on the agenda.

During the board’s November meeting, Langston thanked the members for their support of President Eugene P. Trani’s recommendation to build a new state-of-the-science nursing building. Groundbreaking for the four-story building is planned for June 2005 with construction completed by spring 2007.

Langston reported that the nursing school this fall enrolled 837 students, an increase of 89 percent from the 1990-91 school year (444) and 35 percent from 1995-96 (619). To continue to grow, she said, the school needs a new building.

“We are at capacity,” Langston said. “We could not take one more student.”

The building, constructed in 1928, served as a dormitory for nursing students at the medical college and Langston’s report to the board included defining the shortcomings of the facility.

Some problems with the building, she said, include inadequate heat, poor design and overcrowded classrooms. To portray this, one PowerPoint picture showed students sitting in a classroom wearing heavy winter jackets.

“It looks like hospital wards from the ’40s,” Langston said, describing the basement of the building that now houses the clinical-skills lab that she said floods when it rains.

To accommodate the projected growth of the nursing school, the board earlier had decided not to renovate the current building and West Hospital next door.

The 70,000-square-foot proposed facility, Langston said, will provide much-needed space for larger and more classrooms, faculty offices plus a research laboratory that includes such medical innovations as human-patient simulators.

Another topic at the meeting concerned the Charter School initiative that the University of Virginia, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the College of William & Mary plan to propose to the 2005 General Assembly.

The three schools seek the state’s lawmakers’ approval to forgo additional state funding in exchange for more autonomy, which the school’s presidents say would help to relieve their institutions’ financial burdens. Trani told the board that greater flexibility, indeed, would bring more efficiency, but VCU would not give up any funding from the state, which charter schools would have to do.

“Nothing can get in the way of base adequacy,” Trani said. “I don’t want to give up one dollar of money.”

Though greater flexibility would allow schools to raise tuition and determine faculty salaries, Trani said he does not consider it in VCU’s best interests because the average family income of a VCU student is two-thirds that of a UVA or a William & Mary student. The president also emphasized that 78 percent of VCU students receive financial aid while 70 percent have loans.

Judith Lewis, Faculty Senate president, asked about a charter school being an asset to VCU, saying that teachers at the fall Faculty Senate meeting questioned if they could afford to send their own children to a chartered university.