The groundbreaking ceremony was held on October 2, with Michigan’s Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II in attendance to take part in the ceremonial soil turning. Construction on the project is expected to officially begin in the summer.
Monroe County Community College will soon begin work on its new Welch Center for Health and Public Safety, which will be a transformation of its current Welch Health Education Building. The new building is expected to cost between $22 and $25 million, and will significantly increase the school’s ability to provide training for students in its healthcare programs.
According to a press release on Monroe County Community College’s website, Aaron Mason, who is the chair of the MCCC Board of Trustees, explained what the new building will contain and how it will improve the quality of its offerings. He is quoted as saying, “This project will add critically needed classroom and laboratory spaces for MCCC’s Registered Nursing, Practical Nursing, Emergency Medical Technician, Phlebotomy and Respiratory Therapy programs, as well as classroom and laboratory space to allow for the creation of new programs and the forging of new partnerships with area healthcare providers. State-of-the-art simulation labs will be added. The college’s Criminal Justice program will also be relocated into the building, with dedicated space to expand public safety programming.”
This project has been in development for about four years, with a significant step in the process happening in the fall of 2023 when the school participated in a roundtable discussion to lay out plans to seek funding from the state of Michigan to continue the project. Participating in that roundtable discussion were several legislators, law enforcement officials, and community leaders in the healthcare industry.
In July of 2024, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law $10.9 million in funding for the Welch Center for Health and Public Safety. Additional funding has also been secured via a number of avenues, including existing college funds, an ADN-to-BSN Completion Grant Program grant for $2 million, two Congressionally Directed Spending requests secured by Senator Gary Peters. In order to have received this funding from the state, the school had to provide at least 50% of it to be matched.
“Governor Whitmer and I are committed to helping more Michiganders achieve their dreams of a higher education. I am proud to join Monroe County Community College at the groundbreaking for the new Welch Center for Health and Public Safety. Our recent budget invested over $10 million in this new project that will expand classroom and lab space and help more students get the skills they need for in-demand careers. We must keep working together to lower barriers to opportunity for more Michiganders and build a bright future for communities across our state,” said Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist II.
Senator Peters said, “I applaud the collaborative approach taken between state and federal partners to support Monroe County Community College’s Welch Center for Health and Public Safety renovation project. I was proud to secure more than $1 million to outfit this new space with innovative, real-world training equipment that will help students prepare for in-demand nursing and criminal justice careers.”
New academic programs have been introduced at the school, or will be introduced soon, that will reside within the new center, which is expected to be built and ready for operation in the summer of 2027. Among these new programs are Emergency Medical Technician, Health Sciences, Health Sciences-Psychology Track, and Health Sciences-Sociology Track, and Radiology Technician.
Currently, the capacity that Monroe County Community College has for healthcare training programs is limited, with a number of programs and hundreds of students all sharing the same four nursing beds for skills practice. One program, the LPN program, even had to be moved to another space and its entire curriculum for all students is housed within one single classroom. The newly renovated building will solve these issues, adding three new nursing labs and two respiratory labs.
Dr. Kojo A. Quartey, the president of Monroe County Community College, shared his thoughts about the project and the far reaching benefits it will have, saying, “Training our healthcare and public safety workforce is critical for the health and safety of our communities. This project will ensure that we meet these needs and also serve as an economic catalyst through high-paying construction jobs.”
For more information about Monroe County Community College, visit the school’s website.