By Steven Adamo
Construction of the new Nursing, Allied Health and Administration of Justice building is set to begin in the fall of 2020 and will be completed by Winter 2022.
According to BuildLACCD, the $9.5 billion building program is funded mostly by four bonds approved by Los Angeles voters since 2003.
The new building will be located on the H8 site, located right next to the Anthropology, Geography, Geology and Physics building.
The new building will replace the current nursing building, which was built in 1977.
“We hope to have a place that is built well and secure so that it doesn’t create problems for anyone in that building,” said Lurelean Gaines, chairperson of the ELAC Nursing department.
According to Gaines, the location for the new nursing building has changed multiple times, at one point being placed at ELAC Corporate Center.
“This is a college-first opportunity for many of my students. They’re first generation, they need to be on the campus with everybody else,” Gaines said. “They need all the resources in the environment where they are.”
The new building will also house Allied Health and the Administration of Justice department.
“We’ll be sharing the building and that’s pretty cool because I think there’s some natural overlap in what we do. Out in the real world, nurses and police officers work very closely with each other,” said Curtis Walker, professor and department chair of Administration of Justice. “We’re bringing patients in, patients are coming in and there’s a law enforcement issue. If somebody comes in as a victim… they have to report it to the police.”
AJ was originally housed in the bungalows by the gymnasium before moving to their current location in the F9 complex two years ago.
“We’re one of the last group of people to be put into a real building,” Walker said. “If we had to be here interim, I don’t think anybody would object because this is way better than the bungalows.”
According to Walker, LACCD prioritizes the construction of new buildings based on efficiency.
“They want to build the most efficient buildings first and if you have just one department in a building, it’s less efficient,” Walker said.
Walker said a new lab for the EMT program is in the works, as well as a new forensics science program with a fingerprint lab and blood-splatter lab.
“There’s a couple of cool things that we’re planning, and then they’ll work on the actual layout with us at that time. But that’s a little ways off,” Walker said.