A Campus Transformed—New Apartment Buildings Help Turn The College of St. Scholastica Into a Residential Campus
For the past four years, The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth has been the fastest growing private college in Minnesota.
Many of its educational programs are offered at branch campuses in St. Paul, Brainerd and St. Cloud ---- not to mention nationwide on the Internet. Total enrollment, which includes graduate students and non-traditional adult students who take undergraduate classes at night, has moved well above 3,000.
Meanwhile, St. Scholastica is closing in on its goal of having a traditional, undergraduate student body of 2,000 with half or more living on the Duluth campus.
“This fall, more than 1,000 students will live on campus,” notes St. Scholastica President Larry Goodwin. “That’s a quantum leap of 30 percent above last spring. We have been deliberately developing a residential learning community here in Duluth. We’ve been strengthening the foundational experience that prepares students to go out and touch the world.”
In 2003, the college built Cedar Hall, an apartment building for students. In 2004, it opened the Wellness Center, a state-of-the-art recreation and athletic facility.
Now comes the opening of Kerst Hall and Scanlon Hall, two new student apartment buildings slated to welcome residents for the start of the school year. The three-story structures join Cedar Hall in a wooded highland area at the northwest corner of the 186 acre campus. All told, the three buildings add housing for 400 students.
Becoming a residential campus is a priority for several reasons, notes Steve Lyons, St. Scholastica’s vice president for student life.
“Students who live on campus are more engaged with the learning environment and their education than students who live off campus.” Lyons said. “We know they’re more likely to persist through to graduation They’re also more fully engaged in co-curricular activities, community service, joining organizations and the like.”
The on-campus housing also helps alleviate a neighborhood concern.
“We understand that the Duluth community is concerned about family homes becoming rental units,” Lyons said. “We feel we can meet a community need by providing more housing, and meet our educational goals by doing it. So it’s win-win.”
The magnitude of the investment is large, but it goes to the heart of the College’s misson. St. Scholastica’s leaders say.
“Over the past three years, the College has invested $30 million in new facility projects aimed at enhancing student learning and the student life experience on campus,” said Patrick Flattery, St. Scholastica’s vice president for finance. “These investments serve an important role in attracting new students to St. Scholastica and will provide an improved residential learning environment that will help them achieve their academic goals.”
CONSTRUCTION PROGRESS “PHENOMENAL”
St. Scholastica officials have been pleased with the progress of building Kerst Hall and Scanlon Hall. Construction began in November 2004 and was remarkably smooth, despite at-times adverse weather.
Tom Brekke, the College’s director of facilities, has only praise for general contractor Oscar J. Boldt of Cloquet.
“Boldt has been phenomenal,” Brekke said. “With the help of our local subcontractors such as API Stout Mechanical, Nels Nelson and many others, they’ve done an outstanding job of staying on track despite the tough winter we had with lots of snow and ice storms, and then the awful spring , with four or five weeks of difficult rains.
So that’s a phenomenal feat in itself.”
The project also benefited by avoiding expensive modifications since initial plans were drawn up.
“This is probably the fewest change orders I’ve ever had on a project,” Brekke said. “That means we haven’t had to keep upping our costs. They’ve accounted for the things they needed to account for, so we haven’t had overruns. That represents a good team effort of all the subcontractors involved in the project.”
In excess of 125 trades people have been employed throughout the project.
“This is building upon the success we had with Cedar Hall, our earlier design-build with Boldt,” Brekke noted. “We tweaked a few things based on student input --- a little more living room, a little less kitchen, traded off some minor amounts of space but basically we could expand upon the successful earlier plan.”
ENVIRONMENTALLY PROGRESSIVE
In keeping with St. Scholastica’s commitment to environmental sensitivity, the project has many progressive features.
Three sand filter beds the size of ponds take in all runoff water from impervious areas including the buildings, parking lots and roads. Layers of sand and pearock clean the water to remove oils, sediments and other pollutants.
“It’s pretty darn clean water that makes its way toward Chester Creek,” Brekke said.