Thursday, Jan. 19 2012 7:50PM
Gov. names proposed LS campus in State of State
By Miranda Wycoff, mwycoff@lsjournal.com
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ReprintOn Tuesday, one Lee’s Summit project garnered support straight from the governor’s office.
In his State of the State address Jan. 17, Gov. Jay Nixon lauded the University of Central Missouri’s proposed Missouri Innovation Campus.
The campus would be located in Lee’s Summit on the grounds of the Exergonix green technology campus on the old Pfizer property near U.S. 50 and Missouri 291 South and replace the university’s current Lee’s Summit campus at the Summit Technology Center.
But the Missouri Innovation Campus wouldn’t just be the Summit Center relocated, as Nixon noted, it “has the potential to transform how we educate students.”
The campus, as outlined by Charles Ambrose, president of UCM to the Lee’s Summit R-7 school board earlier this month, would partner with R-7, MCC-Longview and other educational entities to enroll students in the program while still in high school and then allow them to participate in an accelerated high-tech workforce training program with partners like Exergonix, Honeywell, Cerner and ProEnergy.
Ambrose said the Missouri Innovation Campus could lower the cost of a college degree, accelerate the time it takes to attain that degree, provide applied learning experiences that make a student workforce ready and build a student financial aid model that would leave students with no debt upon leaving college and give them direct access to a job.
“I encourage all our universities to take the lessons of the Innovation Campus to heart and develop similar programs,” Nixon said in his address.
Ambrose said he was thrilled with the inclusion of the MIC project in the state of the state.
“There’s two direct benefits from being included in the address,” Ambrose said. “For one, it underlines the fact that this campus is an important project for the state of Missouri. And secondly, he issued a challenge on finding new and creative ways to educate our students and we want to deliver that.”
R-7 school district officials have been included in the campus’s Lead Facilitator’s Group whose task is to make the Missouri Innovation Campus a reality. Representatives from UCM Exergonix, the city of Lee’s Summit, Lee’s Summit Chamber of Commerce, MCC-Longview, Cerner, Honeywell and the state are also a part of that group.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of feedback throughout the state, that there is no better place for us start this project than in Lee’s Summit because of the school district, MCC-Longview and the city,” Ambrose said.
