State lawmakers will hear from Ivy Tech Community College’s president on Wednesday about funding tied to a proposed $29 million capital project at the Columbus campus.
The local campus is ranked first on Ivy Tech’s priority list among all of its statewide campuses for capital projects, Ivy Tech president Sue Ellspermann said Monday, while visiting with Columbus students at Poling Hall.
Ellspermann will present plans for a proposed renovation of Poling Hall to the General Assembly this week, a project that has already been endorsed by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. The proposal has also gone before a state budget committee, she said.
“Of course, if we’re successful, we’re excited and hopeful that Columbus will be looking at a new campus in this great community,” she said.
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The $29 million project by Ivy Tech calls for a two-story, 80,000-square-foot building that would replace Poling Hall, which would be torn down. Poling Hall opened its doors in 1983.
Ellspermann said Ivy Tech prioritizes its top needs across the state on an annual basis, noting that its top two priorities were funded two years ago. At that time, the Columbus campus ranked third on the priority list, but was not funded, she said.
“This is to try to get a new learning environment … but it will look very different than the cinder block walls that you see in this facility,” Ellspermann said while at the Columbus campus.
While she said there is no guarantee the Poling Hall project will receive funding until Ivy Tech officials are notified in April, Ellspermann said state lawmakers have been very supportive.
Justin Underwood, Student Government Association treasurer at the Columbus campus, was among the students who met with Ellspermann.
Underwood, who lives in Whiteland, said a new building could increase enrollment at the Columbus Ivy Tech campus. He has attended Ivy Tech for about two years and is preparing to transfer to Indiana University in Bloomington to earn a business degree.
If the new building is approved, construction would take about three years to complete, said Steven Combs, Ivy Tech Columbus campus chancellor.
Planning for the proposed project could take about a year with construction expected to begin in the summer of 2020 if state funding comes through, he said.
“We’d like to reconfigure the classrooms to be more modern and allow for more collaboration,” Combs said. “We’re hoping to do something architecturally interesting with it.”
Ellspermann also talked with students about how they performed last semester in their eight-week courses, which are being offered in a new Ivy Tech initiative across the state.
“As a state last semester, we made a decision as a college to increase eight-week courses because students do better, they pass at higher rates and they complete faster,” Ellspermann said. “It is a transition as you can guess, but I’m very pleased with how it’s going.”
On a statewide level last semester, Ivy Tech saw a 6.5 percent increase in pass rates for eight-week courses compared to the traditional 16-week format, she added.
