7/8/2009
At North Hennepin Community College, officials have long taken pride in emphasizing hands-on learning.
But Ann Wynia, the school’s president, recalls one zealous student who seemed to take the concept to a level of passion that went above and beyond the school’s already high standards.
For her undergraduate research project, the student “individually examined 10,000 fruit flies, looking for mutation patterns,” Wynia recalled during an interview at her office last week.
“I said, ‘You really had to put 10,000 fruit flies under the microscope?’ I can’t even fathom the amount of time. That is the depth of what these students are doing. It’s really good work.”
The student is working a paid internship this summer and she’s headed to the University of Minnesota for further study this fall, Wynia said.
Hoping to create more such learning opportunities for future scientists and health workers, North Hennepin Community College wants to build a 60,000-square-foot addition to its Bioscience and Health Careers Building on its Brooklyn Park campus.
The addition is one of 31 Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) projects that will go before the 2010 Legislature as part of a $403.6 million bonding request. MnSCU wants $26.5 million for the bioscience project, which is under design and ready for construction as soon as money is in hand.
But whether the money will actually be “in hand” is a good question. Alice Hausman, a DFL state representative from St. Paul who chairs the House Capital Investment Committee, said MnSCU officials are in a tough position because four or five of their projects have been vetoed two years in a row.
If those projects had been funded the first time around, they would be finished by now. Instead, MnSCU has to come back with those same projects year after year, even as other needs continue to pile up, Hausman noted.
The bioscience expansion did receive partial design funding from the state in 2008, which allowed school officials to prepare for construction.
MnSCU expects to award an owner’s representative contract for the bioscience project in August. If all goes according to plan, both the bioscience and business/technology expansions could begin next summer.
“We will have a busy year next year if we see both of those projects being funded,” Reimer said.
With burgeoning enrollment in bioscience, medical device, health, science and related programs, North Hennepin’s existing bioscience building is bulging at the seams. There’s no break in the action during the summer, as a recent tour of the labs and classrooms revealed.
“We opened a new science center in 2002,” Wynia said. “And we were really excited about it. We thought this was going to take care of us. Well, the utilization rate in that building is 140 percent. It may be the busiest building on campus.”
It’s a hopping place, in part, because of North Hennepin’s partnership with Minnesota State University-Moorhead State. The partnership enables metro area students to receive a four-year biology degree from Moorhead State, via North Hennepin, without ever stepping foot on the Moorhead campus.
Other four-year schools that offer courses on North Hennepin’s campus include Metropolitan State University, St. Cloud State, Bemidji State, Bethel University and the University of Minnesota.
Access to those programs at a metro area campus is good news for North Hennepin students, many of whom are older, with full-time jobs and families, and aren’t in a position to pack up and move to Moorhead or Bemidji.
Moreover, North Hennepin is one of only two metro area public universities that offer a research-based biology degree, Wynia noted. The other is the University of Minnesota.
“The ‘U’ has gotten increasingly selective and they are focusing more and more on becoming a top-tier graduate university, which is a wonderful thing,” Wynia said. “That will greatly benefit Minnesota. But we also need a steady supply of bachelor’s degrees.
“That is the niche that we are working so hard to fill in this partnership with Moorhead.”
View from 85th Avenue:
The building addition, designed by Perkins & Will, will rise up on what is now a grassy area with a smattering of trees next to the existing bioscience building. Automobile traffic cruising by on 85th Avenue, which runs parallel to the site, will get a good look at the new building.
The existing campus essentially has its back turned to the busy avenue; a nondescript brick exterior wall greets the busy corridor.
“We are looking for something that would be open and a visual for the community to see the college and to see the activities going on in the new building,” said Dawn Reimer, North Hennepin’s chief financial officer.
Added Wynia: “We are operating late in the evening. We want people to know we are open. We want to advertise it.”
More construction could be on the way.
Hennepin County has identified property on the other side of 85th Avenue, directly across from the bioscience building, as a potential home for a new county library. And there’s also been talk of extending a light rail line through the area.
The light rail line would create an opening for a mass transit hub that would serve library patrons and North Hennepin students.
Elsewhere on the North Hennepin campus, the school’s Business and Technology Center is in line for an addition and renovation. MnSCU is seeking $15 million for the project, which is No. 2 on MnSCU’s 2010 bonding priority list.
The renovation would make better use of the existing building, converting under-used spaces into classrooms. It would also make the building more energy-efficient and, in one fell swoop, address deferred-maintenance needs from the HVAC systems to the roof.
The 29,000-square-foot addition will extend into an adjacent space that’s currently occupied by tennis courts. Crews will also take down an obsolete structure that was tacked onto the original building, creating more breathing room for the new space.
North Hennepin’s planned construction isn’t cheap. For example, the chemistry labs require 12 fume hoods at $50,000 per hood. But college officials say those types of investments are necessary to enable students to receive important hands-on learning.
“It’s not like when I was in school, where one person did the experiment and the other people stood back and took notes,” said Wynia, a former state legislator and 1994 U.S. Senate candidate. |