Penn Breaks Ground On New Dormitory

Ground breaking took place Thursday morning for the new dorm at William Penn University

Oskaloosa, Iowa – “This truly is a good day for William Penn University and for Oskaloosa,” was the words spoken by Oskaloosa Mayor Dave Krutzfeldt.

The ground breaking took place at 11:15 a.m. just north of the current Indian Hills building that is part of the William Penn complex. The new structure will be across Highway 63 east of the student union.

“Welcome to the ground breaking of our new dorm. This is really a pleasure to have everybody here today and take part in this celebration,” was the opening remark by William Penn University President Ann Fields.

“William Penn is very excited to be breaking ground at this time for a 250 student dorm. In our long range strategic plan, the student enrollment was capped because of dorm space. In fact, last fall we almost ran out of dorm space. The new dorm will enable William Penn to keep growing and expanding.”

“Once the dorm is finished, we’ll close Eltse Hall; not permanently. Eltse is structurally sound, and we will renovate Eltse, having one student per bedroom. New heating and air conditioning and new bathrooms. Once Eltse is renovated, the capacity for William Penn will be 650 students on campus. And we’re very proud of that because we are growing and expanding.”

“The new dorm boasts that all students will have individual rooms and sinks in their bedrooms. Only two students will share a bathroom. Quite a difference from Eltse where 8 now share a bathroom. 35 suites or pods with 2 students each, and 45 pods will house 4 students each. Each of the three floors will have a vending machine area, laundry facilities, recycle area and common space. Quite a difference from what we had previously.”

“When I heard William Penn would be constructing a new dormitory, I was thrilled. When your the Mayor of Oskaloosa such things make your heart skip a beat when you hear them. Let me tell you why.” Mayor Krutzfeldt told the crowd assembled at the construction site.

“In some ways, universities are like businesses. The leadership from time to time has to ask itself whether it should try to grow, stay the same, or if it should fall back, retreat somewhat for a while. The easy answer is always to stay the same. But over time that university will fall behind the advancements of the other universities and find their decision to stay the same actually results in falling behind.”

“In the history of cities, there are many watershed moments like this. Times where people of vision make big commitments that impact a city, impact it’s culture, and those decisions will have an impact for many years to come.”

“And so today is another chapter is Oskaloosa’s history as well. It’s a time where we recognize the multimillion dollar investment that will be made, not only in the future of the university, but also in the future of Oskaloosa. For you see, Oskaloosa’s culture is affected directly by William Penn, and it always has been.”

“So I predict, that many years from now, there will be an historian or two that’s going to look back on these years of Oskaloosa’s history. They’ll be looking to see why our population increased while all the other cities our size were decreasing. They’ll be looking at the actions taken, the personalities of the leaders, and they’ll be looking for the clues to our success, and the answer will lie in days like this. When strong leaders made a decision to grow the university and made a commitment here.”

 

Posted by on Mar 30 2012. Filed under Local News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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