By Rowdy Teaff, News Editor
The Houston-Lantrip Center is set to be completed in mid to late October and will be fully operational in January 2020.
Andrew Briscoe, Hardin-Simmons University’s construction manager, explained the function of the Houston-Lantrip Center.
“The building is a result of an individual who had seen a need in the field of dyslexia, and that grew to meeting the needs on a behavioral, autism or intellectual disability range. There was also a significant amount of money given to build a facility… The original thought was that this would be housed in Abilene Hall, but with the accessibility of Abilene Hall limits our ability to do that. Several people came forward and said that they were interested, and that they wanted to help, so we did a fundraising campaign and sent out emails and wrote an article on it, and it was funded almost immediately. So they funded our original scope of work, and another individual came forward and said they wanted to help, so we were able to build a conference center to offer continued education for all school levels,” Briscoe said.
Briscoe continued.
“This building is designed to be a treatment center for autism and dyslexia, but not in the same space. There are actually three divisions of the building that are separated by different card swipe access points. In the dyslexia side (of the building), this is where they do dyslexia treatment, which can be up to an hour-long treatment. On the autism side their treatments can be eight hours a day as prescribed. We’re connecting those two buildings, so that they can share some functionality, but they support graduate programs in those different areas,” Briscoe said.
Briscoe continued to explain how graduate students will be able to continue their education at the Houston-Lantrip Center.
“It [The Houston-Lantrip Center] allows our graduate students to come in here and get all of their clinical hours in house, under close supervision, and meet all of the requirements to get all of the certificates that they need to go on. It also gives them a good base of experience as well. It also allows us to meet a big need in the Big Country,” Briscoe said.
The construction of each side was thoughtfully designed to help provide the best type of environment for those who come to get treatment. According to Briscoe, each side is separated by access points in order to keep anyone from getting on the wrong side. There are two treatment portions of the building, and the south side of the building has a conference center that can be used for a wide variety of purposes.
“It serves as a classroom, it can be two classrooms by pulling the divider wall, or we can actually bring in Greg and the production crew and we can have a full production and make this a true conference center. In this space we can do lecture capture for online learning, and we can also do lecture capture for remote learning… we can take anything recorded in here and take it and edit it and use it for online learning,” Briscoe said.