Eastern Florida continues massive Melbourne expansion

Eastern Florida State College is getting larger, and if all goes as planned the trend won't stop anytime soon.

As classes began Monday morning at EFSC, a feeling of excitement filled the air on the Melbourne Campus. But it wasn't just first-day jitters that permeated through the growing school. The campus was abuzz as students, faculty and staff gathered to break ground on another major expansion.

In the coming months, a new Health Sciences Institute will be built and with it will come labs for nursing, radiography, surgical technology and other fields of study. The $20 million institute will house 12 new and existing healthcare programs.

"The institute opens a new era in training healthcare professionals who will serve countless people in Brevard, the Eastern Florida region and the state for decades to come," said EFSC president Jim Richey to a crowd gathered on the future site.

Richey said this institute alone is expected to contribute about $6.3 million annually to the local economy.

The 65,000 square-foot building is slated to be open by January 2017.

But the Health Sciences Institute is just one part of a massive 10-year expansion plan for the Melbourne campus. It is the second of six buildings to be constructed, and comes just months after the opening of the new Public Safety Institute. Next on the agenda will be a new business building, technology building, hospitality management building and student union.

"It's a pretty ambitious plan, I will tell you, but we will hopefully over the next ten years be able to accomplish a lot of these," Richey said. "Having two out of the six done within two years, I'm obviously very pleased."

In harmony with the Melbourne expansion, other EFSC campuses will see some changes in the coming years as well. The fire academy will relocate from Port Canaveral to the Palm Bay campus where it will be expanded into a "state of the art" facility, said Jack Parker, associate vice president for the public safety institute and campus security.

"We will have our own road with hydrants on it … the future is very bright for this," he said. "We can make it one of the state-of-the-art fire academies in the state of Florida, if not the best."

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The initial cost of the transition will be about $1 million he said, with additional costs of $50,000 to $60,000 a year depending on how much the academy expands and the amount of donations received. Currently, the college's fire academy trains between 80 and 100 firefighters each year, a number Parker expects to double in the coming years.

The Cocoa campus will see changes as well. Most of the healthcare programs offered on the Cocoa campus will move to the Melbourne campus, said John Glisch, associate vice president of communications. This shift will make way for science programs to move into that existing space, which will undergo a major renovation by 2018. The move will also allow for the demolition of the science classroom building, which is beyond repair. Future plans for what will be built in its place have not yet been announced.

"The Cocoa campus, that was the original campus ... so the buildings that are on that campus are the oldest buildings on our four campuses," Glisch said. "So that science building was one of the first put up in the '60s."

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Richey said all of these changes are part of an initiative that began by listening to businesses in the community and expanding degree programs based on strategic areas of job growth. The new construction mimics the college's emphasis on these fields and will support the college's reach into offering bachelor's degrees. EFSC now offers nine bachelor's degrees, including programs in the fields of applied health sciences, computer information systems technology and organizational management.

"This is just one more step toward getting up to the next level of where we want to be," Richey said.

Also in the mix will also be an effort to create a fun collegiate experience, he said, which will hopefully blossom through the addition of sports teams and a student union. The college now has more than 100 student organizations.

"If people feel part of something, they feel part of the college ... and that retains success," Richey said.

Contact Saggio at 321-242-3664, JSaggio@FloridaToday.com or follow @JessicaJSaggio on Twitter