The public health school building will undergo its second phase of renovations in September, following years of student enrollment growth within the college.
The first phase of renovations — which took place from June 2016 to December 2016 and cost $4 million — focused on converting locker areas into office spaces, said Bill Olen, director of capital projects for Facilities Management. This fall, the $4.9 million second phase, which is slated for completion by March 2018, will repurpose building space to make three additional classrooms and four new labs, he added.
Updating one teaching lab and two outdated research labs will also be part of the renovation, said Mark Brenneman, director of academic facilities and operations for the public health school. Since these labs already exist, the classes that normally use them will have to be relocated temporarily but will still be taught in the building, he added. The public health school will use the summer to shift people around in preparation for the upcoming construction in the fall, he said.
“We have to plan the classrooms that will need to go in another space in the building,” he said. “We kind of needed the summer to get folks settled in their temporary locations, so that’s why [the renovation is] being pushed back to the fall.”
Brenneman added that the project was split into two phases because the school only had sufficient funds for phase one last year. It received the rest of the money in time to complete the renovation starting this fall.
[Read more: University of Maryland is undergoing new construction despite unfinished projects]
Most of the construction will take place during the fall semester, Olen said, noting “it will be disruptive to people in the building, and we’ll try to minimize all of that to … nights or on the weekends.”
One reason why this second phase is so timely is because the public health school has been expanding recently, Brenneman said. In spring 2017, there were 2,821 undergraduates in the public health school, up from 2,593 students in spring 2016 and 2,444 students in spring 2015, according to the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment.
“We started the public health science undergraduate program a few years back [in 2014], and that has just caused us to have a higher student population, so we’ve been in need of offices and new teaching lab spaces for a few years now,” Brenneman said. “The School of Public Health is generally growing — it’s getting more faculty and more students in.”
The new classrooms and labs won’t be designated to one concentration within the school, and several types of classes — including kinesiology, public health science and family science — would be assigned to the new area post-renovation, Brenneman said.
Before Eppley Recreation Center was built in 1998, the public health school housed this university’s main recreation facility, and the locker space from that time still exists in the building, Olen said. The locker area is “underutilized” now, but by converting the space into more areas for learning and teaching, it would increase functionality, he added.
Colleen Keating, a sophomore public health science major, said she welcomes the new renovations, as she thinks the building is “kind of dull and boring.”
“The lobby when you first walk in is nice, but everywhere else is kind of dreary,” she said. “I didn’t know that a renovation is happening, but I really haven’t had too many classes in SPH. I think that’s cool that they’re adding these things.”
Keating said that as a recently declared public health science major, she understands the draw for students.
[Read more: Dorchester Hall will close for renovations after the fall 2017 semester]
Keating said for people like her who want to become physician assistants, the public health science major is an ideal option.
“Instead of doing a biology major where you have to take a lot of really, really hard upper-level classes that you don’t need for PA school, public health science really hits all of the marks you need for PA school,” she said.
With the program’s continued growth, this two-phased renovation is meant to alleviate the constrictions that exist now, Brenneman said.
Olen said there has been a request for an addition to the public health school building in order to break ground and add more area to the space. This has not received funding yet, and it is in extremely preliminary stages, Brenneman said.
“We were talking about doing a building space master plan this year to reevaluate what our needs are going to be moving forward,” Brenneman said. “Even with this new renovation that we’re scheduled to do, a lot of that space is called for — we have people who need that space — so we have to think about what the next big project would be.”
