M a n c h e s t e r M a rv e l
At the expanded Manchester facility, skilled academic counselors can help more students like Stewart and Pennington focus on success. They’ll help non-traditional students like Sherry Maggard, who won this year’s Gladys Perry Tyng Award for excellence in elementary education, discover that college opportunities have no age limits. Members of the community can gain job skills or enhance their lives through non-credit courses. Helping local students and citizens achieve their goals, says Gray, made directing the Manchester campus “a dream job” even in its strip mall years. Now he has a dream facility to offer, with enhancements unimaginable in 1992.
Options and opportunity for students and the community The new Manchester campus houses a full range of services: advising, financial aid and scholarship counseling, placement exams and career counseling. Offerings include credit and non-credit college classes, adult education including GED, community and workforce education, conferencing and events. More than 100 classes will be offered each semester, allowing most students to take all their required general education classes at Manchester. Complete degrees or substantial portions of degrees are available in ten areas: • Elementary Education (bachelor’s degree) • Early Childhood Education (associate degree) • Educational Leadership (master’s degree) • General Studies (bachelor’s degree) • Business Administration (master’s degree) via distance education • Paralegal Studies (associate degree)
18 Eastern
• RN to BSN Bridge (nursing degree for students with an associate degree in nursing)
• Psychiatric Nursing (master’s degree) • Rural Nurse Practitioner (master’s degree) • Bachelor of Social Work (bachelor’s degree)
The 48,636-square-foot facility hosts 24 classrooms, a computer lab, wet and dry science labs, five Interactive TV (ITV) rooms, 17 offices, a bookstore and a 5,200-square-foot meeting/multi-purpose space. Classrooms feature “smart boards,” large computer screens with touch capability, allowing instructors to display and manipulate data or bring in internet sources, video, audio and graphic components to enrich course content. Students can watch lectures and interact with faculty members throughout the university network. The technology will allow nursing students to view live demonstrations of delicate procedures. When the Richmond campus hosts a national-level conference, the proceedings can be broadcast to Manchester. Advanced computer capabilities position Manchester as the Disaster Recovery Site for handling emergency data processing for the Richmond campus via an upgraded information pipeline which Gray describes as “the difference between drinking from a water fountain and drinking from a fire hose.” The city and region will benefit as well. The multi-purpose room will support conferences, workshops, seminars, fairs, exhibitions, banquets and receptions. Elected officials can address a group from Lexington or Washington, D.C. The facility can provide targeted workforce education for current or potential employers. With the amenities of a full service conference center in an academic ambiance, Gray hopes to attract business and trade groups to the Manchester area while providing revenue for Eastern: “There’s nothing you can do in any facility in the country that you can’t do here.” The result will be a radical enhancement of the region’s attractiveness to new industry. From hosting initial meetings to workforce education, the Manchester campus will be woven into the economic future of the region.