Ribbon Cut On Health College’s New Home

Hundreds of alumni, students and community members gathered on Southern Connecticut State University’s (SCSU) campus to tour a brand new building devoted to healthcare and human services studies — and designed to strengthen a suffering sector of the state’s workforce.

While SCSU’s College of Health and Human Services first opened in July, the broader community, including local leaders and state representatives, joined the public university for the first time on Friday to cut a blue ribbon celebrating the glossy four-story, 94,750 square feet of classroom space and research labs.

They also came together to consider how the $17.4 million, state-funded building designed by New Haven-based firm Svigals + Partners may help produce local experts to replenish pandemic-exacerbated staff shortages in critical fields such as nursing.

“Our state right now needs more mental health professionals than ever,” Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz told the audience.

With nurses exiting the profession en masse and a ​“silver tsunami” on the way, Bysiewicz said that ​“what students are gonna learn in this place is more important than ever.”

Sandra Bulmer, the dean of SCSU’s college of health and human services, said that the institute’s upgraded home will offer students an interdisciplinary education that will mirror the university’s own organizational partnerships with ​“over 300 Connecticut agencies to create workforce solutions.” She said the university is collaborating with Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, Clifford Beers, the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America Southern Connecticut, and Yale New Haven Health among other institutions to train future professionals, create jobs and lead new pathways for health research.

Melody Lehrman, whose 12-year-old daughter, Amber, has received communications training from Southern students, attested to the impact of programming currently taking place in the university.

Lehrman said that when she first found out her daughter had down syndrome — and, later, ADHD and clinical anxiety — she was told her health insurance wouldn’t cover speech therapy because of a technicality: Her daughter had been born with a developmental disorder rather than having acquired communication challenges through an injury or other means.

When the Stratford mother discovered SCSU’s speech pathology center, she said she had determined there was ​“no other way to get my child the speech services that she needed.” It was thanks to the university’s speech language clinicians, she posited, that her daughter was able to walk into her first acting class this month and read all of her lines without a problem. ​“Everybody understood her perfectly,” Lehrman stated proudly.

Currently, SCSU’s Communications Disorders clinic serves an average of 150 clients from the Greater New Haven area each week.

That number has the potential to grow thanks to the construction of several spacious clinic rooms, one-way-mirror observation areas, two language and learning research laboratories, and space for play-based interventions like ​“lego therapy.”

A host of tour guides showed wide eyed visitors those changes and a number of other snazzy upgrades following the congratulatory speeches.

The new building including everything from a renovated fitness room outfitted with stationary bikes and the equipment needed to perform pre-employment screenings (which help assess whether workers applying for athletic jobs are strong enough to endure them) to a biomechanical laboratory exploring products like carbon fiber insoles to protect ​“diabetic feet” against ulcerations that can require amputations. Each element of the building was deliberately designed to better academic possibilities while serving members of the surrounding community, such as New Haven and Hamden, tour guides explained.

The college’s nursing division even showcased a simulated apartment constructed to give aspiring caretakers the chance to practice in-home care before getting into a client’s house.

“We’ve got a full working bathroom,” Dr. Rodriguez Keyes informed onlookers. ​“We’ve got food in here,” she continued, rummaging through a stretch of kitchen cabinets.

Even the building’s staircase, which many might think was installed to allow people to travel between floors, as stairs do, was described as ​“specifically designed to get people moving,” by one tour guide.

“We train the workforce for the state of Connecticut, and we take that responsibility very seriously,” College Dean Sandra Bulmer stated. 

Transitioning his focus from investors and visitors, SCSU President Joe Bertolino turned to the university’s students with a plea: ​“Stay, work, and pay taxes in Connecticut.”