Dixie College is seeking new center

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jun 8, 2006 by Erin Stewart Deseret Morning News

Set in the fastest-growing community in the state, Dixie State College is quickly running out of space -- in outdated buildings -- to fit its surging enrollment.

With a 100 percent increase in students in the past decade, the St. George college is overcrowded and bracing for even more growth once the college's burgeoning bachelor's degree program is in full swing.

"We're not only reflecting the enormous growth of Washington County, but we added to it as well," said Donna Dillingham-Evans, vice president of academic services. "We're bursting at the seams with good students."

As the number of students continues to mount each year at Dixie, school leaders don't think they can wade through the traditional building process that could leave some departments waiting 15 years for more space.

School officials have a plan, however, to circumvent that process and get more space for all the students within five years: a supersized, all-in-one building right in the center of campus.

"The state is struggling to fund education in general and Dixie in particular. We have to be a little bit more creative to get caught up with some of the problems," Dixie President Lee Caldwell said.

The project -- estimated to cost between $40 million and $60 million -- will get its first hearing before the Board of Regents on Friday, and school leaders hope it will land before the state Legislature in 2007.

The idea behind the 200,000- to 300,000-square-foot, five-story complex is to combine an updated library, student services and several academic departments under one roof. Then, if those departments continue to grow, they could move into new buildings and the library could simply expand without the need for a new building.

Departments like elementary education and science could get more space now and save the state money in the long run by reducing the number of renovations needed to accommodate future growth, said Stan Plewe, vice president of college services.

Those future projections hint at even tighter quarters for Dixie with more than 25 additional bachelor's degrees set to come online within five years and an estimated enrollment increase of 50 percent.

"Our dilemma is to realize that you're only going to get so many state dollars for capital buildings. It's kind of a notion to be the right size for the near future and then the same right size in the 2020 scheme," Plewe said. "The flexibility exists to adjust to whatever that pressure would be."

If the school doesn't get the complex, Plewe said Dixie will still need seven new buildings at a cost of about $150 million in the next 20 to 25 years.

Even if the all-in-one concept is approved, Caldwell said, Dixie is going to have to continue reshaping its campus to cram in more students. Locked in by a cemetery on one side and a highway on the other, land expansion for Dixie is limited.

And while college leaders are trying to buy more stretches of land, the blistering land prices in the area pose a major roadblock. Dixie will have to look increasingly to vertical growth to add on classrooms, Caldwell said.

"If I look ahead 10-15 years, I think it's not unreasonable to assume we're going to have 15,000-20,000 students here. And with the campus footprint we have, that would be a stretch and a half," he said.

Dixie State did get some relief from the 2005 Legislature with about $15 million for a new health science building. That department in particular has seen the strain of rising enrollments, Evans said.

A microbiology class, for example, saw a 371 percent increase in enrollment since 2000.

But even with the 78,000 additional square feet in the health sciences building -- to be completed in 2008 -- Evans said the sciences are still pressed for space to get their students through all the general science classes that are prerequisites to beginning a health science major like nursing or radiology.

"It gets upstaged by something else because it doesn't seem to be the priority in the state to fund just classrooms," she said.

E-mail: estewart@desnews.com