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Texas Woman’s University’s Houston Center College of Nursing will name its future home after a former regent and longtime benefactor whose Southeast Texas arts and education foundation has donated $3 million toward the construction of the new TWU health sciences and medical campus.
The school will be named the Nelda C. Stark College of Nursing at TWU’s new 10-story, 202,000-square-foot campus that will be located at the southern gateway to the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
Stark, who died in 1999, graduated in the 1930s from the College of Industrial Arts, now TWU, with a bachelor’s degree in biology.
“Mrs. Stark was always interested in medicine and dedicated to health,” says Walter Riedel, CEO and chairman of the board of the Nelda C. and H.J. Lutcher Stark Foundation.
“She said she would have gotten a nursing degree but they were not offered [at TWU] at the time. She did work for some years as a certified lab technician and many years later, she served as a hospital administrator for a while at the [Frances Ann Lutcher] hospital here in Orange. She was always supportive of nurses and the nursing profession.”
The $37 million building project supported by the foundation’s donation not only will allow for the current 650 nursing student population to double, but the building will house and allow for increases in all health care professions that include physical therapy, occupational therapy, nutrition, library science, and health care administration.
“Presently, we are operating near capacity,” says Roy Kron, a spokesman for TWU, but this new expansion will allow the Houston campus to more than double its total health care student enrollment to 3,000 from the present census of 1,200.
The new building is needed because the Houston campus has seen a 32% increase in health care professional education enrollment since 2001, according to the school.
The new facility, which is scheduled to open in 2006, has been designed to accommodate classroom sizes and schedules. Classrooms will be available for not only traditional instruction, but also conferences, videoconferences, and distance learning.
The design includes four 40-seat classrooms, two 40-seat distance education classrooms, five 60-seat classrooms, four 120-seat lecture halls, one 250-seat lecture hall, seven four-person study rooms, four nursing labs, an anatomy lab, and a 120-seat computer lab and media center.
Because of its location, the new campus will have easy access to the surrounding teaching hospitals.
The $3 million donation is the principal gift in a $15 million fund-raising campaign for Houston Center building enhancements, scholarships, professorships, program development, and technology.
In addition to Stark’s interest in the health profession, she was one of the original board members when TWU opened its Houston campus in 1960.
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