Executive Vice President and Provost Eddy Rojas announced a major milestone in St. Thomas’ history in a Monday morning email: the beginning of a nursing program.

The email announced that the Morrison Family College of Health School of Nursing started searching for its first bachelor’s and master’s nursing students to participate in fall 2022 nursing class.

“This is a tremendous achievement for us as a university,” Rojas wrote. “One which expands opportunities for students, tackles a critical nursing workforce shortage, and increases our capacity to serve the common good.”

Martha Scheckel, founding director of nursing in the Morrison Family College of Health, expressed her excitement for this new program and solidified the vision of the new program.

“The nursing program leads with cultural responsivity, and there’s a focus on personal care, ingenuity, clinical excellence, and all of this is to advance health equity and social justice,” Scheckel said.

Both Scheckel and Rojas emphasized the importance of recruiting diverse students for the program and increasing access to culturally responsive care.

“The school has set a goal of enrolling at least 30% students of color and students from other underrepresented backgrounds to help provide care in diverse and rural communities,” Rojas wrote.

Scheckel highlighted the impact of recruiting a diverse class of students for the program.

“I think anytime that you increase diversity, you need to have diverse ways of supporting and helping students to be successful,” Scheckel said.

The nursing program already has an initial team in place, Scheckel said, which will expand as the program develops and the school admits more students. The program will have prerequisite courses in the Schoenecker Center, but the actual coursework will take place in the Summit Classroom Building, which will be renovated.

“That building will house nursing and social work, and that building will be completely remodeled to include the high fidelity simulation and other labs for the nursing students,” Scheckel said.

Scheckel emphasized this program’s goals: to educate students in acute care settings and to educate students in community or public health settings.

“We are also really focused on increasing our education for students to be really good preventionist advocates and system thinkers,” Scheckel said.

The School of Nursing plans to prepare its students for the future of nursing with certain principles in the program’s vision.

“The Morrison Family College of Health has guiding principles for personal care, social determinants of health, health equity and social justice, as well as advocacy and systems change,” Scheckel said.

Rojas expects the future to be bright for the School of Nursing.

“We are grateful to be expanding career opportunities for our student body, while helping to serve the health care needs of more people, in more communities,” Rojas wrote.

Natalie Hoepner can be reached at hoep8497@stthomas.edu.