The $26 billion state budget approved recently by the Tennessee Legislature for the coming fiscal year includes $15.4 million for construction of our new School of Nursing facility.

An architectural rendering of our new School of Nursing facility.

That allocation — combined with $2.5 million in federal funds and numerous private contributions — means we can soon begin construction of the first facility built specifically to accommodate our School of Nursing, which will help the 25-year-old academic program nearly triple its number of annual graduates.

“The next couple of years are going to be exciting for TTU, the Cookeville area and the Upper Cumberland region,” says President Bob Bell. “This building project, which will be a major construction project for the Cookeville area, really gives us an opportunity to better serve our state, particularly the Upper Cumberland region.”

That’s because it will serve as a significant resource in overcoming a state and national nursing shortage that is expected to grow in the future.

According to the Health Resources and Service Administration, the nation’s need for nurses to help care for the aging Baby Boomer generation will increase by nearly 30 percent — or more than 800,000 total nurses — from 2000 to 2020.

University officials agree that in spite of such an obvious need, it would have been impossible to get the building project under way so quickly without the continued support of state leaders, including Rep. Jere Hargrove, Sen. Charlotte Burks, Gov. Phil Bredesen and Deputy Gov. David Cooley, and federal lawmakers, led by Sen. Bill Frist and including Sen. Lamar Alexander and Congressmen Lincoln Davis and Bart Gordon.

“I certainly want to thank our state legislative delegation for including funding for this much needed construction project in its annual budget, and the federal support we’ve received also helped get this effort off to a great start,” Bell says. “We also want to thank our TTU friends and alumni for their outstanding support of this critical project.”

The university’s next step will be to present the construction phase of the project at July’s meeting of the state building commission, and with that board’s approval, begin accepting bids from potential contractors possibly by early next year.

Once the bidding process is complete, work crews could begin breaking ground at the construction site as soon as next April, and in as little as 18 months following the groundbreaking, construction could be complete.

The university has chosen the block at the far end of the Main Quad, on the corner of 7th Street and North Mahler, as the location for the new nursing building.

The corner will eventually serve as an anchor linking the School of Nursing with a major entrance to the area Cookeville has designated as its medical district.

Such a position will be a welcome change for a program that has been in transition from one temporary facility to another since 1998, says Nursing Dean Marilyn Musacchio.

“I was ecstatic to learn that funding for the School of Nursing building is included in the state’s 2005 budget because that means the temporary facilities we’ve lived in since 1998 now have an end in sight,” she says.

The program has been shuffled to various temporary locations since that time because the building in which it was previously housed — a former elementary school at the edge of campus — was in such poor structural condition that it had to be condemned.

Significant numbers of nursing students continued to enroll, but because of the program’s severe facilities need, only about 45 — around half of any given freshman nursing class in recent years — could be accepted in upper division junior- and senior-level classes.

“But this construction project will ensure that the university will be able to meet the nursing and health care needs of the Upper Cumberland region,” Musacchio says.

That’s because the new building will not only accommodate a greater number of upper division students than ever before, but will also provide the necessary technology — including computerized patient simulators — to educate 21st century nurses.

And with roughly 75 percent of our nursing graduates choosing to remain in the Upper Cumberland, a more technologically advanced facility directly translates to more technologically skilled professionals, Musacchio says.

Other features of the new building include state-of-the-art classrooms, clinical labs and faculty facilities, a 300-seat auditorium, other conference and meeting rooms, an updated Student Health Services facility, and a Rural Health Center to serve the special needs of our region’s poorest populations.