Lidia Hicks watched two of her Cristal Cleaning Service employees atop a cherry picker on a broiling Saturday afternoon. They were cleaning the uppermost windows on the third floor of Greenville Tech’s soon-to-open Prisma Health Center of Health & Life Sciences.
“Whoo, this is nice, it makes me so happy!” she said, admiring the building with beige bricks and soaring glass walls. She and her 20-plus crew started on the site when construction began two years ago.
“It made, like, ‘Wow, thank you, Lord, for this opportunity,’” she said.
Susan Stall feels much the same way.
“It’s crazy when you go in this building, it is like you are in Prisma,” said Stall, a trustee of the F.W. Symmes Foundation, which awarded the Greenville Tech Foundation a grant toward the $70 million facility.
“The F.W. Symmes Foundation has been one of Greenville Technical College’s and the Greenville Tech Foundation’s most ardent and generous supporters since 1998,” said Cindy Duncan, who coordinates grants and events for Greenville Tech Foundation.
GTF has supported Greenville Tech for more than 50 years.
Four large classrooms and one small classroom in the new building will bear a Symmes Foundation placard, Duncan says, adding that the donation helps provide students with “exceptional opportunities to learn, grow and meet the workforce demands of our community.”
Symmes Foundation grant
Symmes Foundation awarded the grant to fill “a massive educational gap in our community,” Stall said. “Like pumping our readiness for employment for people all over our area, they’re helping get people ready for good-paying jobs, these medical jobs.”
The new center rises between the Robert W. Leach Sr. University Transfer Building and the Beattie E. Huff Student Center on the Barton Campus just off South Pleasantburg Drive.
The Symmes Foundation is named after Fred W. Symmes, a Greenville textile magnate. He also donated properties such as Pretty Place, located at YMCA Camp Greenville on the northern border of Greenville County, and the Hall of Science at the Roper Mountain Science Center.
Greenville Tech’s glistening new facility is so futuristic that Symmes, who died in 1957, would be hard-pressed to believe what its 125,000 square feet will offer. It includes virtual dissection tables, medical imaging and ultrasound suites, and more.
Asked what she would think if she ever went to a hospital and discovered an alumnus had studied in the building she polished to its opening, Hicks said, “I’d say, ‘Bless this guy or this girl, whoever is in there.” Still beaming, she went on, exclaiming, “Inside is pretty, and I think it’s going to make people smart. I believe in that.”
Fast figures and facts about Greenville Tech’s Prisma Health Center of Health & Life Sciences:
- Cost: $70 million
- Expected number of visitors, including companies, each year: 150,000
- Health and science graduates to be served yearly: More than 500
Source: Greenville Journal
Building features:
Health and science students have been using the nearly 60-year-old Ernest F. Hollings Health Sciences Center and the Robert W. Leach Sr. University Transfer Building. The new facility will fully modernize their learning experience.
- Medical imaging, ultrasound and radiological technology suites
- Classrooms and “conversation rooms”
- Lab with virtual dissection tables that use fully interactive, life-size touch screens
- Study carrels
- Outdoor seating
Source: GVLtoday
