Things are looking good for Odessa College’s Wood Health Sciences Center to open in spring 2024 and hoping the James Segrest Stadium will open in September.
The stadium will have an outdoor fitness facility next to it. The college got a grant from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of up to $50,000 that will help pay for it.
It and the track will open at the same time.
“Everything is looking good,” Vice President of Administrative Services Ken Zartner said. “They’re doing some really, really phenomenal work. As soon as it’s ready to go we will open it up to for different uses throughout the community and for our own events.”
For the Health Sciences Building, everything is going well. That’s why the college has been buying equipment for it.
“Normally, you don’t start buying stuff until a couple months before a project is complete. But with all the leeway and the timeframes of receiving stuff we’ve been buying since day one of this project and just housing here on our campus with warranties that won’t start until they go into our facility. But everything’s on pace and we’re being able to purchase everything that we need and it’s looking really good,” Zartner said.
The Odessa College Downtown Project is also on pace.
Located at the corner of Fourth and Jackson streets Phase I includes a large green space, a covered stage, two performance canopies, an entryway, a splash pad, restrooms and parking for food vendors. Completion is expected at the end of April or first week of May.
“We hope to host our grand opening May 9. (The) splash pad has been laid; concrete is going down; the green space should be there any second. Everything’s going really well for downtown,” Zartner said.
He added that OC has just signed agreements with its contractor MW Builders to build a covered amphitheater space that will be in the middle of the campus.
“That is about a six-month project. We’re hoping by the fall (that will be done) as well,” Zartner said.
The Rudy Acosta Pavilion is expected to be finished sometime between the fall and spring of 2024. It will be between the Learning Resource Center (library), Health Sciences Building and Deaderick Hall. It will have a canopy area as well.
“We don’t have a timeframe on that,” Zartner said.
The electric lineman program will be across the street from the main campus. It is moving from the west campus at the Oncor facility and should be ready for classes as soon as May or June.
The lineman class is still at the west campus and should wrap up at the end of May or first week of June.
“When that’s completed, we hope to transition the program here full time across the street. There’s a dirt lot area that we’ve put on eight inches of caliche; fencing … We’re going to have the linemen poles placed there strategically and then we’ll do some nice mesh covering around all of the fence lines to enclose it and also make it look much nicer,” Zartner said.
“We have better facilities here, so those students are able to have access to more Wi Fi, more technology, better classroom spaces; all sorts of different things,” he added. “Having it on this campus that allows it to be more visible to the community,” he added.
There are 19 students in the program now and this could double that number.
“We want to see if we can operate more times throughout the day instead of just nights and weekends,” Zartner said.
He said they are fundraising for a pedestrian bridge that will cost about $1.5 million.
“But it is so important to us because you can go to the current HSB facility right now anytime during the day, and you’re going see seven, eight rows of parking with no spaces … (available),” Zartner said.
“We’re expanding this facility to be 150% of what that facility is. Look at our parking lot out here right now. There’s no space. Now you add 10, 12 rows of students, our employees are going to have to park across the street. We’re going to have to find a way to bridge across the street to here in a safe manner. Just from a parking perspective, we’ve been able to acquire a couple of different lots of property across the street. One of the bigger lots was that old university apartment complex that we owned at one time, sold and then we bought back that’s used currently as a construction site. That will be another parking facility. So as we move across the street, our programs, our CE (Continuing Education), our safety training, our library programs, our cosmetology programs, we really need to develop a gateway to our campus that’s safe. … Last week, we walked across the street to do a training with 67 different employees at Williams Hall. Cars were running red lights left and right. It’s just not safe. Some of these people are going to 60, 70 miles an hour down this way. We’ve seen it all the time. If we’re going to ask people to park across the street, if we’re going to ask them all these things, we just really need to give them that passage where they feel comfortable,” he said.
In the future, OC is looking at building a new academic building that is being called Wilkerson 2 right now.
“That will sit directly south of the current Wilkerson facility. It’s a beautiful concept design that we have. We know as we bring on more students the need for housing is significant. We want to build an additional housing complex, a four-storey unit that can house up to 150-200 people,” Zartner said.
“Long term plans include building a new performing arts center where Deaderick currently sits. We have the old auditorium and we would love to build a new facility there and go away from Deaderick and then use the existing Fine Arts, for once again, parking as we will get rid of that building because it’s reached its end of life. So a lot of big plans on the horizon,” Zartner said.
He said there are no concept designs yet as they are far off on the horizon, but there is a master plan for the campus for how it is going to support students.
“We’re at 8,082 students for the spring right now. The largest spring enrollment — the largest enrollment period in the history of the college in a spring semester. When colleges usually see enrollment drop in the spring, we literally just broke an all-time record on top of an all-time record was 10, 11 years at this point,” Zartner said.
“Our campus infrastructure was … really built for about 4,500 students. (We’ve) doubled that capacity in size and then you add on our two early college high schools (Odessa Collegiate Academy and OCTECHS). That’s 800-plus students walking around here all day long. They need places to eat, places to hang out, places to study, places to live on our campus. And all those high school senior kids drive their own cars,” Zartner said.
“It’s really good problems to have and it’s really good for our community as we try to educate as many folks as we possibly can,” he added.
Once they relocate all the faculty and students to the new Health Sciences Building, they will remodel the current one to support the early college high schools.
It would include additional spaces to eat and classrooms. “Then they would go to their college classes across the campus, which would then free up the second and third floors of the LRC for more space and eventually be able to get Deaderick auditorium to be rebuilt. All those facilities are being used right now by our current early college high schools,” Zartner said.
He added that that’s a lot of young minds to educate.
“We’ve grown so much. Even from an employee perspective, you look 10 years ago we’re at 318, (3)19 full-time FTEs; now fully staffed, we’re at 422. That’s a lot more offices; a lot more people. When you double enrollment, though, you need to have the support staff around to support that many more students. … We’re so fortunate and blessed to be supported by our community and to have the success that we’re currently having, but we’re not stopping.”
