The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
COLLEGE SHOWS OFF New additions, renovations to Lakeland’s Health Technologies wing
“It’s an immersive environment for learning. It just creates this energy.”
It’s been more than two years since Lake County voters approved a 0.4-mill capital improvement bond to help Lakeland Community College fund the renovation and expansion of the college’s 20-plus-year-old Health Technologies Building, finish a science hallway renovation project and complete other infrastructure improvements.
Today, the school’s got a lot to show for it as Lakeland’s new Health Technologies addition opened its doors in January to the first students who will work, study, practice and, school officials hope, thrive there.
“It’s an immersive environment for learning,” said Deborah Hardy, Lakeland’s dean for
— Deborah Hardy, Lakeland’s dean for health technologies
health technologies. “It just creates this energy.”
The 88,000-square-foot, four-floor portion of the $45 million project appears to be more than the usual classroom building. In fact, It’s much more than that.
For example, the layout is designed to mimic that of an actual healthcare facility (think Cleveland Clinic, Lake Health and University
Hospitals campuses) because that’s where the people studying there will likely seek employment.
“This is as close to real life as it gets,” said Lakeland’s surgical technology director, Janice Lawrenz, inside the school’s new Perioperative Education Laboratory on Feb. 13 as some of her first-year surgical-tech students practiced prepping themselves and their laparotomy trays for the kind of action they’ll see as healthcare professionals in the not-too-distant future. “We
probably have one of the best labs in the area.”
She added that this alone will make the latest crop of potential Lakeland health technologies graduates some of the best-prepared in Northeast Ohio.
“As first-year students, these guys are so strong, they’re going to go into their clinical sites and they’re going to be rock stars,” Lawrenz said about the exposure to cutting-edge technology and the realistic scenarios with which these students are now dealing with.
When asked about her favorite parts of the renovations and new building, Hardy replied that there are “so many favorite parts, too many to mention.”
But Hardy did manage to articulate her appreciation for the same genuine workplace exposure Lawrenz lauded.
“In my mind, each one of our programs has this
real-world learning experience and I think that would be the most exciting thing about it to me,” she said. “I mean, for one thing, we have this immersive learning environment that is real-world and high-tech. And we have such highquality instruction, too. It’s like a perfect storm, in a good way.”
Among some new offerings at Lakeland, which will manifest themselves inside the school’s new building, are the State Tested Nursing Assistant program, Occupational Therapy Assistant program and the polysomnography certificate program.
Among the building’s amenities are wide, open spaces and an airy, relaxed vibe. The building not only features environmentally friendly geothermal heating and cooling systems. It also makes use of natural light via its many of windows, along with numerous
other green-minded provisions. There’s also a rooftop greenhouse and an outdoor garden area in the works up there, too.
“There’s a lot of open space,” said Erin Toth, director of the school’s new polysomnography certificate program. “There’s just a nice, calm feeling to it and it’s very conducive to learning. Plus, there are all these cool things that really support studying and the learning process.”
Some of these “cool things” include personalized study spaces that look like teleportation pods from an episode of Star Trek, meeting spaces encased in glass walls and other common areas which incorporate everything from classic, face-to-face, conference-table arrangements to virtual cubby holes and couch-like seating to fit myriad study preferences.
“We really created this space so as to allow students to pick and choose what works best for them,” said Barry Artis, program director for the new Occupational Therapy Assistant Program, which is in the first of three stages of accreditation through the Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy.
Hardy echoed this sentiment.
“Different learners need different things to help them learn,” she said. “Some people want to be in a comfy sofa-chair. Some prefer to be at a desk and others want to be tucked away in a corner where there tend to be fewer distractions.”
Hardy said that, in her more than 25 years as an
educator, she’s come to appreciate the different learning styles through which students succeed and she’s elated Lakeland has worked to incorporate facilities appropriate for each into the design of the new facility.
“We have visual learners. We have kinesthetic learners and we have solitary learners,” she said. “And we’ve worked hard to try to accommodate spaces where each is able to thrive.”
Although the new Health Technologies Building opened in January, it isn’t complete and probably won’t be until around August. So the school’s grand opening event is still tentative, as far as the date goes.
In the meantime, students from all over campus seem to be gravitating toward what’s available there now.
“I’ve already gotten quite a few e-mails,” Hardy said about the place. “And I’ll walk up to students and ask: ‘What do you think?’ Then they’ll say: ‘We love it! I even had one student come up to me and say ‘We need more!’ And I had to tell him: ‘We’re not done yet!”
Artis praised the structure’s bottom-to-top facsimiles of genuine medical facilities, in which the first floor mimics a healthcare facility’s pre-hospital environs.
The second floor is designed to be like a hospital and the third like a posthospital treatment environment.
“I don’t feel like I’m walking into school,” Artis said. “I feel like I’m walking into a healthcare facility.”