Related Information

Inst. Assessment Portfolio
College Senate

8. Physical & Technical Resources

Description | Appraisal | Projection | Exhibits

Description

Capital Community College opened the doors to its new campus on September 4, 2002. Located at 950 Main Street in downtown Hartford in the former G. Fox department store, the College occupies approximately 40% of the building, which the State of Connecticut purchased in 2001 from 960 Main LLC, a private developer who owns the other 60% of mixed-use space. Renovations to the building were completed in Summer/Fall 2002, and the new college campus was unveiled as one of the Governor’s Six Pillars of Progress for Downtown Revitalization. The College’s new location in the heart of the capital city strongly supports its mission to serve the educational needs of the community, as well as the needs of government agencies, business, and industry. At the same time, Capital Community College finally united its two, very diverse campuses on Woodland Street and Flatbush Avenue under one roof. This solved a major facility issue that had plagued the College since the legislatively-mandated merger of state community and technical colleges in 1992. Sharing space in the new campus with Capital Community College is Capital Preparatory Magnet School, the result of an agreement with Hartford Public Schools that commenced with the Fall 2005 semester.

The college campus has 242,074 assignable square feet (asf) dispersed among 11 floors of contiguous space in the front part of the building along Main Street, and another 5,913 asf on the Talcott Street level in the rear part of the building along Market Street. The campus contains 44 classrooms and 49 laboratories (including art studios, and laboratories for science, nursing, early childhood education, language, and computers) with a total capacity of 2255 seats for students. Specialized spaces include the Academic Success Center (that includes the Math Center and the Learning Center), the Early Childhood Education Center with Laboratory School daycare (located in the Talcott Street annex), the library, the information technology center, the video/media production center, and a photo darkroom. Other functions are served by the Welcome Center, two art galleries, the mailroom, bookstore, cafeteria, and dedicated spaces for departmental offices, support, and storage. Spaces for more general use include the main lobby, the community room, the 300 seat auditorium, several student activities offices and recreation rooms, and many small conference rooms.

A five-story atrium cuts through the heart of the campus from the seventh floor to the roof. At the base of the atrium lie the college cafeteria and internet café, part of the seventh floor student union space, which also includes student activities offices, student club space, a TV room, a game room, and the college bookstore. Faculty and staff offices circle the atrium on floors eight, nine, ten and eleven. A glass skylight admits natural light to the atrium, creating a dramatic interior space.

The College has recently installed an interior electronic signage system. On each floor, flat screen video monitors display campus information and announcements that are remotely programmed and scheduled with various messages. This contributes to the unification of the eleven-floor vertical campus.

All entrances to the College offer handicap accessibility. Five passenger elevators carry people through the vertical campus. The College’s sole freight elevator is inoperable. Free parking for all College faculty, staff, students, and visitors is available in either of two parking garages, which together provide space for over 600 cars. The City of Hartford’s Morgan Street Garage is located across Market Street from the rear entrance to 960 Main Street. The Talcott Street Garage is connected to the campus by an enclosed skywalk that leads directly into the retail area on the Main Street level of the building.

Throughout the college campus, classrooms and laboratories feature high-tech instruction stations with built-in multimedia presentation systems. Virtually any format of audio-visual material (PowerPoint slide shows, internet web pages, computer documents, videotapes and DVDs, textbooks, newspapers, graphing calculators, etc.) can be presented on a large-screen projection system with ceiling-mounted speakers. Auxiliary input jacks allow additional equipment (laptop computers, audio cassette player, digital cameras, etc.) to be connected and displayed on the classroom presentation systems. Science laboratories feature video microscopes, which display on the presentation systems. Presentation systems are also installed in other academic support areas, such as the Academic Success Center, the ESL Language Lab, small group tutoring rooms, the Academic Dean’s and President’s conference rooms, the Community Room, and the auditorium.

Classroom furniture is a mixture of tablet armchairs, loose tables and chairs, and fixed seating/table arrangements. Furniture in laboratories is appropriate to the respective disciplines (science, chemistry, nursing, art, etc.).

Science laboratories can accommodate up to 168 students in two anatomy and physiology labs, two biology labs, a microbiology lab, two chemistry labs, and one physics lab. There is a coldroom for storage of perishable reagents and other materials that require low temperatures. The labs and several related preparation and storage rooms contain the necessary equipment, supplies, and relevant safety equipment. For Nursing, the College’s largest academic program, faculty and students use four nursing laboratories on the eighth floor for instruction and practical skills application. The labs contain 21 bedside stations with mannequins, accommodating 65 students each lab day. The labs are equipped with a wide range of specialized equipment.

The fifth floor of the building is dedicated to the Arthur C. Banks, Jr. Library, whose features are detailed in Standard 7. Campus-wide computer network technology is administered and managed by the Information Technology (IT) Department, staffed by a director, network manager and five technicians. IT staff are responsible for supporting the College’s massive computer technology and infrastructure, described in greater detail in Standard 7.

The Academic Media Technology (AMT) Department operates out of a facility that features a 1,792 square foot television production studio, a broadcast-quality TV control room, an off-line video editing and streaming media suite, five small multimedia workrooms for communication students, a photography lab and classroom, a small conference room, and office and storage space. The television production studio, TV control room, and off-line video editing and streaming media suite were newly equipped during the 2003-2004 academic year. Among its several functions, the AMT department is responsible for supporting faculty use of the media presentation facilities of the classroom and maintenance of the programs required for distance learning instruction. These functions are described in Standard 7.

Full time maintenance staff include a supervising stationary engineer, a stationary engineer, two skilled maintainers, a supervising custodian, two full-time custodians, and one part-time custodian. Although this department is responsible for maintaining the building and grounds, 90% of custodial services are outsourced to contract cleaners. Removal of hazardous materials is managed by a chemical hygiene officer in the Math & Science Department, and is conducted in accordance with legal requirements through an environmental and hazardous waste management service company.

The College purchases chilled water and steam from Hartford Steam Boiler. There are no chillers or boilers within the campus. Eleven air handling units supply heating and cooling to twelve floors, with 334 variable air volume units located throughout the building. Individual heating and cooling in each room is controlled by computer and scheduled for maximum efficiency of the system.

The Public Safety Operations office and Master Sergeant’s office are located in the first floor lobby near the Main Street entrance. Public Safety staff include a police master sergeant, two lead building & grounds patrol officers, and six patrol officers. All public safety personnel have CPR and First Aid certification, and several are certified in the operations of automated external defibrillation equipment. The Public Safety Operations area has a state-of-the-art security system with CCTV cameras monitoring every floor of the campus, and the ability to monitor doors and emergency phones.

Physical resource planning at the College responds to the identified needs of specific departments. The table of Proposed Technology Upgrades shows some of the projects under consideration and provides an illustration of how resource evaluation leads to plans (Exhibit 8.1). It includes initiatives from the departments of Nursing, Early Childhood Education, Science and Mathematics, and Academic Media Technology. These initiatives are incorporated into the College’s strategic planning process, which includes all physical and technology resource priorities. The Information Technology Implementation Plan details the schedule for IT strategic plans (Exhibit 8.2).

IT System reliability is ensured by limiting single points of failure and by use of backups of essential data on file servers. Systems are maintained on a regular basis with required updates and patches applied on a regular cycle. Data security is provided by requiring all users to have active accounts on the College systems and requiring logons to all IT resources with exception of library reference terminals.

System reliability is also ensured by controlling physical access to sensitive areas such as data closets and server rooms. In addition, screen savers on all staff and faculty PCs are set to engage after 15 minutes of inactivity, and require logon credentials to resume the session.

Although systemwide policy declares that there is no assumption of privacy in individual accounts, each member of the college community is provided with network data storage space that is accessible only via a personal logon account. IT system administrators may access the accounts for support services.

Appraisal

The move to downtown Hartford has proven to be a major benefit to Capital Community College and its students. Proximity to the hub of a public transportation network has made the College more accessible to the community it serves. By consolidating its two campuses into one building on Main Street, the College has realized a greater level of efficiency in supporting its mission. The interior design of the campus, beginning with the spacious Main Street lobby and carrying through to the five-story atrium, has impressed faculty, staff, students, visitors, and the community, as well as garnered architectural awards for its designers. Publicity surrounding the move greatly increased recognition of the College in the region and had an immediate positive impact on enrollment. Designs for the facility assumed a 20% increase in enrollment. Within the college’s first academic year in the new building, enrollment had exceeded that projection.

All mechanical equipment that serves the college facility is new and adequate to meet present needs. Lighting throughout the campus is motion-controlled, minimizing power requirements. Computers, printers, and copiers use sleep modes to reduce power requirements when idle. Collection bins recently installed throughout the campus for recyclable paper, plastic, aluminum and glass have greatly reduced solid waste generation, supporting a healthier environment.

The renovations to the building included construction to divide the College’s one third of the building from the two thirds owned by 960 Main LLC, a private developer. This condominium-style ownership has created physical and financial burdens on the College, including the following:

Capital Community College owns the entire Main Street façade and sidewalk, along with the responsibility for their maintenance and safety. College maintenance staff must ensure a safe and clean sidewalk for entrance to the 960 Main LLC retail space, even during times when the campus is closed, requiring the College to pay overtime wages to staff for work unrelated to College business.
Other entrances to the campus lead into space owned by 960 Main LLC, through which College students, visitors, and staff must pass to get to the college lobby. By contract, the State of Connecticut has committed the College to pay a common use fee for such access, greatly inflating the College’s operating expenses.
The freight elevator that serves the ten floors above Main Street is inoperable and the loading docks located two floors below the College’s Main Street lobby are owned and managed by 960 Main LLC. This leads to time-consuming procedures for reception of shipments, which then must be broken down into smaller packages for transport via passenger elevators. Because of the clumsiness of this process, some shipments have been turned away, others have been unable to be adapted to the passenger elevators, and some loading dock service fees have been increased.
Since the State of Connecticut shares ownership of the roof of the building with 960 Main LLC, repairing leaks in the roof has been a tangled process. Heavy storms have damaged ceilings, walls, and floors on the top levels of the campus, and although college maintenance staff have responded quickly to clear up and repair the damage, they cannot prevent it. The College has been forced to repair all roof leaks and deduct the costs associated with 960 Main LLC from the monthly common area usage fee.

Other constraints are related to the decision to renovate a regional landmark, the former G. Fox department store, for college use.

The building’s listing on the National Registry of Historic Buildings inhibits making changes to its appearance. This has prevented renovations that would serve the College’s interest, such as the installation of the exterior signage needed to identify Capital Community College as a public presence, the refurbishing of the College’s main entry doors, and the replacement of energy-inefficient windows on the 950 Main Street façade. The College has, however, undertaken a costly installation of interior storm windows to reduce heating and cooling loss.
Structural columns throughout the building required the creation of some unusually wide rooms, seating with obstructed views of the instructor, and limited student capacity. Faculty and students have adapted to the space by rearranging seating around or away from the columns, or reducing the number of students admitted into classrooms compromised by columns.

The space development of the new campus has presented several additional problems.

The provision for the college bookstore was altered, forcing it into its current temporary location in the Student Union where it occupies space that had been planned for a fitness center. This space has been inadequate to the needs of students, particularly during peak business seasons. The College has not yet been able to find a practical location for the bookstore nor to restore the plan for a fitness center.
Five passenger elevators service College occupants from the main lobby to the eleventh floor, but have proven to be insufficient for the traffic patterns of the college. Before and between classes, long waits and overcrowded elevators are an inconvenience to faculty, staff, and visitors and an impediment to students’ timely arrival in classes.
The cafeteria, located on the seventh floor, opens into the five-story atrium. During meal times, the cafeteria is inevitably noisy, and that noise has been magnified by the presence of the younger Magnet School students. The noise interferes with classes taking place nearby on the seventh floor and carries up the atrium, disturbing personnel on the floors above.

The College has been fortunate to secure adequate parking for faculty, staff, students, and visitors, but since the College does not own any parking facilities, arranging for the use of them creates several burdens. Contracts for parking, along with fees for use exceeding the contracted allotment, tax the College’s operating budget. Access to the main parking garage necessitates crossing a busy city intersection; however, the closer garage (to which 116 staff members are assigned) is darker and less well-maintained. There is concern that more parking accommodations will soon be needed.

Classrooms and laboratories are a significant and welcome upgrade from those at either of Capital Community College’s previous campuses. The high-tech environment provides appropriate teaching and learning tools to faculty and students alike, right at their fingertips. The Academic Media Technology (AMT) Department, with support from the Information Technology (IT) Department, efficiently maintains the classroom equipment, minimizing down time of presentation systems. The AMT Department offers ongoing training, online tutorials, and troubleshooting support, giving faculty confidence in the systems they use for their daily teaching activities. Positive feedback and only a few major technical problems, along with records of increasing usage of the presentation systems, support the claim that the College’s “Classrooms for the Future” have been a valuable feature of the new campus. The classrooms and laboratories are well-equipped, well-serviced, and well-suited to teaching and learning at the college level. However, some problems are evident.

Most classrooms have chalkboards rather than dry-erase white boards, creating a chalk dust problem. Despite regular cleaning, equipment and furniture are frequently covered in dust, and the long term effects on classroom presentation equipment are unknown.
Classroom furniture is not ideal. The tablet arm chairs offer limited writing surface and tend to break easily. The rooms with tables are crowded, inhibiting the mobility needed for active- learning pedagogy. Fixed seating in some of the larger classrooms is closely spaced, leading to issues of comfort and concerns about privacy during testing.
Space constraints in some laboratories and prep rooms inhibit such functions as preparation of laboratory materials, effective demonstration of nursing mannequins, protected storage of lab coats between laundering, convenient storage of students’ personal belongings, and storage for chemicals, solvents, and equipment.

The presence of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in the heart of the campus adds a community service and outreach dimension to the College’s identity. However, it has strained space and service capacities for the College’s own students, whose enrollment increases already present challenges. The Magnet School operates Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:30a.m. and 3:30p.m., during which time it occupies 11 classrooms with 230 students.

Classroom and office space on the third floor and three computer labs on the sixth floor have been reserved for the Magnet School during its hours of operation. This has forced the Business & Technology Department to vacate its integrated office and activity space and relocate elsewhere in the building.
The third floor now mixes Magnet School pre-teen and teenagers with clients of the College’s Continuing Education Department, which offers personal enrichment courses, adult education, and business and technology training to various corporate clients. Frequent disruptive behavior of the children has created an environment that is not conducive to the training needs of the Continuing Education Department clientele.
On the sixth floor, the Magnet School’s reservation of three computer labs has reduced the availability of open lab space, and college students now have fewer convenient places to do their work. Additionally, the reserved computer labs have been subject to more damage than others, with broken keyboards and keyboard shelves, scratched computer monitors, and mice rendered useless.
Efforts to repair and restore the Magnet School labs burdens the College’s IT Department and distracts its staff from serving the needs of college personnel. A sixth floor setup and storage room has been taken from the IT Department and designated for Magnet School use, further limiting the functionality of the department.
With the reduction in available classrooms, the College, already constrained for classroom space as enrollment has grown, has had to limit the number of course sections offered in a semester, accordingly increasing enrollment per section. In some cases, a classroom designed for 20 students is now congested with 25 or more.
During the peak lunch time, most cafeteria seating is reserved for use by the Magnet School students. With limited seating added to the previously noted noise problem, many college students and staff have chosen other, less convenient, locations for their meals.

Technological upgrades have been generous. The equipment upgrade to the Academic Media Technology facility in the new campus has allowed the college community to realize a high level of production quality in multimedia projects. Students in the Communication Media program benefit from gaining hands-on experience within a facility that meets broadcast industry standards. Further, the College’s cutting-edge computer network has received approximately $800,000 over the last two years to update hardware and system infrastructure. This growth has enabled the college community to participate in the technological boom of the surrounding service area. However, the infrastructure is showing strain.

The IT department is stretched to its limits in terms of staffing levels, skill sets of staff, and expectations of the college community. System complexity continues to grow with the addition of Connecticut Community College Systemwide initiatives, such as MIIS and Luminus, as well as more sophisticated instructional technology requests by various academic programs.
The online course delivery platform, WebCT Vista, necessitates more complex PC desktop configurations that further push the limits of the IT department’s technology, budget, and skills. Although many feel dissatisfied with the performance of campus computer technology and its requisite service and support, the IT department feels it is fighting a losing battle. Staffing reductions by statewide position freezes along with budget constraints on the use of consultants to minister to the more complex systems, have added to IT gridlock.

Concerns have arisen regarding emergency evacuation procedures. Fire drills are perceived as disorganized and stairwells become easily congested, a concern that is intensified by the presence of the Magnet School’s faculty, staff, and students. Otherwise, the campus security system meets the existing needs of the College, and has helped to keep the College’s crime rate relatively low. However, it has little room for expansion. As technology evolves, the system will need upgrading to remain current. Likewise, Public Safety personnel need ongoing and updated training to continue to meet the security needs of the campus and college community.

Complementing routine evaluations, the community-wide participation in the current self-study process over the past year highlighted several problems with physical resources that have since been solved. When it was reported that drainage for eyewash stations in a laboratory was leading to some lifted tiles that could harbor bacteria, the problem was moved to a high priority and resolved. When results from focus groups and surveys indicated that cafeteria noise was seriously hindering academic work, the College contracted for the installation of sound-absorbing acoustical panels in the cafeteria to minimize noise levels. Panels have been installed on the walls surrounding booths, and additional panels will be installed in a later phase. The same surveys confirmed longstanding discontent with the quality of food and service in the cafeteria, and the vendor has now been replaced. These actions indicate responsiveness to community concern about physical resources.

Projection

Many plans are underway to improve the campus facility. Most active are the steps toward acquiring more space. The State of Connecticut has authorized $6 million for college expansion, and the State Department of Public Works, on the College’s behalf, is negotiating with 960 Main LLC to lease additional space in the building on the tenth and eleventh floors adjacent to the college-owned space. College administration is currently drafting a plan (Exhibit 8.3) for use of the new space and for renovation of some existing space with several goals in mind:

Increasing classroom and science laboratory capacities
Repairing the college freight elevator
Relocating the college bookstore from the seventh floor to elsewhere (on campus, or nearby)
Expanding the seventh floor student union space to include a fitness center (as in the original campus plan) and more student activity, club, and lounge space.

Included in the lease for this new space will come additional parking in the Talcott Street Garage. Additionally, the Dean of Administration is working with the Hartford Parking Authority to provide documentation regarding parking needs to the Department of Public Works, in an effort to acquire even more parking accommodations for the College.

Space within the current campus will be regained when the Hartford Public School system finds a permanent site for the Magnet School. The term of the current lease (Exhibit 8.4) between the College and the Magnet School ends June 30, 2008. The relocation of the Magnet School will restore classrooms, offices, and laboratories for college use. Further, as described in the Hartford Public Schools’ Educational Specifications for a New Facility (Exhibit 8.5), the College will gain shared use of some of the facilities in the Magnet School’s new building, such as its gymnasium and multipurpose space. No location, however, has been chosen for the Magnet School’s permanent site, and the college community is making accommodations during its tenure. To offer more access to computers, for example, a placement testing computer lab on the second floor has been made available during the day, and the IT Department has added more student computers in the library.

Some physical campus problems cannot be eliminated, but the College is coping resourcefully. Chalk dust continues to accumulate in classrooms, but the Academic Media Technology department has minimized its effect on electronic equipment by cleaning the classroom presentation systems more frequently. Furniture repairs have been covered by manufacturer warranties or handled by the Maintenance Department when warranties have expired. The Dean of Administration, with input from staff and faculty, plans to replace all of the questionable tablet armchairs with sturdier, more comfortable furniture starting in the summer of 2006. Lockers have been installed in the hallway outside the microbiology lab for students to store their personal items. To avoid harm in crossing the intersection by the parking lot, the college administration and relevant governance committees have frequently issued warnings about the importance of obeying the crosswalk signals, and will continue to work with the city of Hartford to keep this inevitably busy downtown intersection safe. In addition, an expanded College Affairs Committee has been charged with handling campus concerns related to hazardous material waste, parking, and campus safety and evacuation procedures.

Network technology plans include wireless access for non-college owned equipment, and network jacks for student-owned laptops. The College IT Department, along with hired consultants, is piloting these upgrades in summer 2006. Systemwide initiatives are underway for further improvements such as fully automated account provisioning and single sign-on capability for all network tools. These will be implemented, with input from the College’s IT director, by the System office via the Luminus project.

These technology features need support from additional staff members with IT engineering skill sets and the capability to manage the infrastructure and provide backup to existing personnel. Plans to improve IT services include additional training for the department technicians to increase their proficiency in creating, managing, and troubleshooting the complex desktop PC configurations expected in the future. The IT department also plans to provide staff to interface at a professional level with the academic departments in an effort to increase and improve communication, planning, and execution of academic technology requests. Details are outlined in the Information Technology Implementation Plan (Exhibit 8.2).