St. Scholastica Building $17M Expansion

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The former site of Kenwood Elementary School is being turned into a state of the art academic center.

The Three acre space will be home to a 45,000  sqaure foot building for the College of St. Scholastica’s health science programs, which educators say have outgrown the main campus.

It’s Scholastica’s first ever academic building in Duluth built off campus.

Educators say it’s in line with their commitment to education, the community and their Benedictine heritage.

As Scolastica ceremonially broke ground crews were alongside laying the foundation for their new Health Science Pavilion.

“I can’t tell you how proud we are to be apart of this amazing and bold project,” said Dr. Rondell Berkeland, Scholastica dean of the School of Health Sciences.

Located off Woodland Avenue it will be three stories tall, housing the universities occupational and physical therapy programs along with a new physician assistant program, pending accreditation.

“What it amounts to is trying to educate people as whole persons,” Scholastic President Larry Goodwin said. “So that in their professional service they will be dealing with others as whole persons.”

Educations say the icing on the cake is a free clinic that will be located on the first floor.

It will serve patients who are uninsured or underinsured while students gain supervised hands on experience.

“This is a brand new model,” said Berkeland. “This integrates a high caliber of graduate students into a vital community.”

Exam rooms, a motor behavior lab, tele health equipment and other cutting edge technology are some of the other features of $17 million dollar project.

“This can be transformative and this opportunity is quite unique,” Scholastica physician assistant program lead Dr. Kim Kruger said. “It’s a fairly forward way of doing medical education and we’re going to be at the forefront of that.”

The new facility will also allow them to enroll more students which educators say is needed due to the shortage of workers and increasing demand of rehabilitation services.

“By investing in the talents and the skill sets of our young people that will then go to work and make Duluth a place that they want to live and work, we will continue to grow this community,” Duluth mayor Don Ness

The Health Science Pavilion is slated to open Fall of 2016.