Spotlight

The symbiosis of partnerships              

A chalkboard, a professor and students. It’s the typical mental image of a university. But a university is so much more. It’s an engine for economic development, for cultural enrichment, for lifelong learning — a more expansive view that depends on partnerships with outside entities. At Emporia State, partnerships are the norm.

The training program for nurses at Newman Regional Health was becoming obsolete in the early 1990s. Rather than the hospital’s three-year training program, students were opting for a two-year associate’s degree or a four-year program. That’s when two institutions with a vision for education, the hospital and ESU, joined forces. Mutually supported by the hospital and university, a four-year baccalaureate program was born in 1993 under the guidance of Dr. Merle Bolz, then the training program director. Today, 60 to 70 percent of the nurses who have completed the program before and after 1993 are still working in a six-county area around Emporia. The partnership literally saved nursing education for this region.

“Had the university not wanted to participate in this collaborative arrangement, I think our training program would probably have gone away,” said Terry R. Lambert, Newman’s chief executive officer. “From the university side, the program has become a very popular program.”

And it’s very successful. The Newman Division of Nursing is striving to meet a nationwide nursing shortage, fighting against limited resources, instructors and clinical space. When the Kansas Board of Regents secured more money for nurses, the reputation of ESU’s nursing division led to an additional faculty member and two patient simulators — enough to allow the division to admit 44 new students this fall, compared to 35 in previous years.

The hospital largely funds the program: salaries, supplies, expenses, travel. ESU supports it by recruiting students and offering student services, kicking in resources when needed, and more. For instance, the division has a nursing library staffed by graduate students from the School of Library and Information Management, holding materials purchased by Newman and catalogued in ESU’s Kellogg database. The library’s computer lab was installed and is now maintained by ESU’s Technology and Computing Services. “It truly is a sharing of responsibility,” said Dr. Judith Calhoun, the division’s chair.

The symbiosis at play also enhances the education students receive. Unlike other three-year or two-year programs a student might pursue to become a registered nurse, ESU’s nurses earn a bachelor’s degree while spending their sophomore, junior and senior years gaining hands-on clinical experience. “This allows them one more year to have those clinical experiences, to have those lessons sink in,” Calhoun said. Added Lambert, “There are students who choose this program just because of that.”

An educational partnership saved nursing education for the region. Now let’s go global. The first four-year degree in the engraving arts in the world kicked off this fall at ESU, the product of collaboration between ESU, the Emporia Area Chamber of Commerce, and Emporia-based Glendo Corp., the foremost manufacturer of engraving equipment in the world.

In its infancy, the program’s introductory course has seven students. The instructor, master engraver Chris DeCamillis, is teaching this year while a national search is conducted for a professor. Work is also under way to endow the professorship. Because DeCamillis’s teaching load isn’t a full one, Glendo essentially “purchased the balance of his normal work week,” said Glendo general manager Kim Pember (BSB 1988, MBA 1989). Thus Glendo has an artist-in-residence and a master engraver for in-house R&D. Glendo also donated eight of the classroom’s engraving stations, and ESU purchased four more.

Glendo’s stature in the engraving community is a major factor in the program’s visibility; the company routinely travels around the world with its equipment and expert engravers, attending trade shows and installing training centers. In November, Pember had just returned from Italy and had her mind on a forthcoming training site in China. She’s finding that engravers are particularly excited to see their work recognized as art, not just a craft.

In this respect, future graduates of ESU’s fine arts program will enter uncharted territory. The potential is open-ended. In the spring, art department chair Elaine Henry fielded an inquiry from a Chicago company that hires engravers to emboss clock faces and other products. “That’s the tip of the iceberg for what can be done industrially, as artists,” Henry said. “It’s all open-ended at this point because the students will determine how they utilize it when it’s paired with their fine art training. (The community is) so excited about the expansion of the engraving arts. They’re anxious to see what the students are going to do with this when they learn this skill.”

Marketing an ESU education can be like marketing a product. “I think the future for communities and educational partnerships is to work together to capitalize on niches,” Pember said. “The things that separate us and make us stand out will become increasingly important.”

Partnerships and community outreach spread across campus. In the School of Business, senior citizens attend computer literacy courses at no cost. Accounting faculty and students offer free tax preparation to lower-income community members, and the school matches a governmental grant to sponsor the Small Business Development Center.

The Teachers College has its partners in the dozens and dozens of school districts that accept student teachers. They also partner with Butler County Community College and Kansas City Kansas Community College to offer ESU education degrees. Students attend ESU classes at the community colleges for two years, study at ESU for the third year, and return to their home areas for student teaching in the fourth year.

The ESU debate team hosts tournaments for Kansas high school debaters. The college debaters are able to network with school officials and gain teaching experience working with younger students, while high school students are treated to ESU hospitality and perhaps influenced to attend school here. In the English department, student-journalists at the Bulletin work closely with the Emporia Gazette to produce the student newspaper. The Gazette staff has been involved in ESU journalism in other ways, such as judging high school competitions and teaching classes.

The community has found a number of uses for ESU’s science expertise. Faculty members regularly perform outreach presentations in area schools. The chemistry department does water sample testing and converts waste materials to useful products. Earth science expertise is shared on issues such as flood protection, while physics knowledge has analyzed welds for the local metal fabrication industry. When graduate-level biology students research wildlife topics, Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks staff – from their research office at the northwest corner of campus – participates.

From one example to the next, ESU and its allies in education show why the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

See the story in the electronic magazine, page 6

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Last Updated April 17, 2008