Beilue: Soon to be more crowded; renovation to fill Amarillo Center for WT nursing – Amarillo.com

By Jon Mark Beilue| Amarillo Globe-News

In less than nine months, in time for the Fall 2021 semester, West Texas A&M Universitys contribution to downtown Amarillo will be in full swing. A No Vacancy sign might as well hang from the door of the Harrington Academic Hall WTAMU Amarillo Center at Eighth Avenue and Tyler Street.

We will be full, said WT President Dr. Walter Wendler. For all practical purposes, we will be full to the top. There will be no more unused space. There will be hundreds of students and faculty in and out of that building all day long.

Construction and remodeling have begun on the final of three major pieces to occupy the Amarillo Center WTs School of Nursing. When completed by summer 2021, junior and senior nursing students will be in classes and labs on the second floor, first floor and basement of the building that was formerly the Commerce Building.

We are obviously looking forward to relocating there, said Dr. J. Dirk Nelson, Dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. With the build-out and renovation, we will have 25,000 square feet dedicated to the bachelor of science nursing curriculum.

That renovation will include a new skills lab, simulation lab, assessment lab, debriefing room, seminar room and classrooms in addition to office space for 20 to 25. Students, faculty and staff also will benefit by being closer to the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center and Amarillos two largest hospitals Northwest Texas Healthcare System and BSA Health System.

Our nursing faculty is second to none, and it will be nice for them to be in a facility like this, Wendler said.

Over the past five years, graduating WT nursing students have a 96.56 percent passing rate on the NCLEX (National Council Licensure Examination), the test for entry-level nurses. The national average is 86.41 percent.

Our passing rate for the test is among the highest in the state of Texas, Wendler said. You cant do much better than 96 percent. You tell people youre doing better than that and they think youre lying.

Most of the nursing faculty is in Old Main on campus, but by the fall semester, they will be entirely out of there and relocated either in the Amarillo Center or the Bivins Learning Nursing Center on campus. The Bivins Center will continue to provide classes in pre-nursing for freshmen and sophomores.

The nursing program will join two departments within the College of Nursing and Health Sciences that have been there since the Amarillo Center opened in March 2019 the Department of Communication Disorders and the Center for Learning Disabilities.

Previously, Communications Disorders was located in the Virgil Henson Activities Center above the swimming pool.

Not ideal, said department chair Dr. Brenda Cross.

The relocation to downtown Amarillo may have positively impacted the WT Speech and Hearing Clinic, a major part of the department, more than any other group.

Moving the clinic was probably the biggest consideration we had to make, Cross said. So many of our clients are from Amarillo, so driving to Canyon did not seem like a big deal. But many physicians were not referring their patients to us because of the drive.

The WT Speech and Hearing Clinic is an outpatient clinic for speech, language and swallowing therapies where services are provided by graduate student clinicians who are supervised by licensed speech-language pathologists and audiologists.

Moving downtown has definitely opened us up as a referral source for local physicians, Cross said. Our client population in the last 1 years has more than tripled. Weve always seen the rural area patients, but weve definitely picked up a larger percentage of Amarillo patients.

Like nursing, pre-communication disorder students go through a second admission prior to their junior year based on grade point average and application. In past, upper-level students transitioned to classes from Old Main to the Activities Center to the Jack B. Kelley Student Center.

We were all over the place for classes, Cross said, so to be able to stay in one building, to have the clinic adjacent to all of our classes, has been seamless.

The other group the Center for Learning Disabilities actually had the shortest move. They were located in the former Chase Tower, less than a block away, but a little move means a lot.

Its been a wonderful opportunity, and one of the greatest differences is the clinic space we have now, said Dr. Michelle Simmons, director of the center and the Lanna Hatton Professor of Learning Disabilities.

The Center for Learning Disabilities focuses on three areas: working with parents and families for those in the home with a learning disability, providing student workshops, and assisting teachers with strategies to help those students to better cope and learn.

We have improved accessibility and a better useability of space, Simmons said. Its a welcoming and beautiful presence for what we do, which is to support and increase opportunities for students with learning disabilities, specifically with reading and attention disorders.

There are other entities in the Amarillo Center, including graduate programs in social work and psychology, and the Small Business Development Center. But the three largest departments will be together. Not only will several hundred be in one building daily to add to downtown commerce, but theres an expected synergy from all together.

We feel a little isolated being the only full-time program here, but having another complete program here from the same college in the building will bring a sense of a more WT feeling, Cross said. We can collaborate in clinics and class. It will make it feel like more of an extension of the main campus instead of out here feeling like its an island sometimes.

Editor's note: This column originally appeared on the WT website.

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle? If so, email Jon Mark Beilue atjbeilue@wtamu.edu.

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Beilue: Soon to be more crowded; renovation to fill Amarillo Center for WT nursing - Amarillo.com