Kristina Bugante
Staff Writer
To accommodate the campus’s growing population, University administrators are planning to expand the campus borders and reorganize the map in the near future.
In the next six to nine months, the University plans to build two new classrooms, three seminar rooms, 25 new offices and one new lab.
“It’s an exciting time for La Verne,” said Clive Houston-Brown, associate vice president of facility and technology services. “We’ve got great growth (and) expansion of facilities to accommodate that growth.”
Both Houston-Brown and Provost Greg Dewey described the process of these changes as a domino effect – as one facility relocates, another will follow, and so forth.
“The footprint of the University is getting larger,” Dewey said. “What we want to try to do is move services out into the periphery so that we could have more classrooms in the center.”
The Counseling Center, currently located in Hoover Building, will be renovated into new classroom and office spaces. It will now move to where the Literacy Center is, located off Second Street.
Graduate Admissions will move to Facilities Management’s current location on Campus Services West, and Facilities will move to the old bookstore on Bonita Avenue temporarily before going off-campus.
The Literacy Center, Human Resources and the Office of Information Technology will also be moving off campus.
The Honors Center, which is currently located on the ground floor of Miller Hall, will be moved to the third floor of Wilson Library and the photography department will expand.
One of the classrooms in Mainiero Building will be renovated into a new biology lab.
The University was able to keep the Modular Classrooms for a little while longer, even though the city requested that they were to be taken down by the end of this year.
“Our goal is to add additional classrooms during the summer to be able to handle the number of classes that are being taught on campus,” said Chip West, senior director of central services and capital planning.
Additionally, classrooms in the Arts and Communications Building, Campus Center and Leo Hall will be upgraded with new classroom furniture, painting and carpeting, Houston-Brown said.
The main campus is not the only part of the University that is facing changes.
A baseball/softball field and a multi-purpose field will be built on Campus West, a 47-acre lot just down Arrow Highway.
The University will share these new athletic facilities with the city, but will have exclusive use of them during baseball and softball season.
A vacant building that sits on the new parking lot located across Arrow and south of A Street will be torn down, leaving room for more parking.
The campus map will be constantly upgraded as these changes happen, Houston-Brown said.
Even though these changes will happen to mostly administrative units, Houston-Brown hopes that they will have minimal impact on students.
“We will work with (faculty and students) through time to minimize any impact,” he said. “It’s going to be a tiring six to nine months for a lot of the staff as we try to get through all of this, but it’s an exciting time for the University.”
“We’ve made some real progress in relieving some of the pressure but we still have to continue to work on it,” Dewey said.
Kristina Bugante can be reached at kristina.bugante@laverne.edu.
