Cool story: Shut in '80s, St. Thomas nursing school may have new life | Health & Medicine | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Even when the University of St. Thomas School of Nursing shut down two decades ago, its resurrection was always simply a matter of faith.

To its graduates — those who attended the school during its affiliation with the university, as well as the hundreds more who finished legacy programs at St. Joseph Hospital or Dominican College dating back to the early 20th century — it never really died.

“We have an alumni group that has maintained and nurtured an endowment fund waiting for the day that the school might reopen,” said Beth Papasakelariou, a Houston attorney who earned her St. Thomas nursing degree in 1980, and who, with her husband, is leading an effort on the cusp of bringing the school back. “To me, it will be a dream come true.”

A glimmer of new life emerged in 2008, when Carol Peavy and her husband, Odis — founder of PV Rentals — gave the university $2.5 million to re-establish the program. That gift covers the first faculty chair and $500,000 for planning expenses.

In all, UST needs about $15 million to get started, said Ken Dominicis, the university's vice president of institutional advancement. That includes $12 million to endow six faculty positions and $3 million for scholarships. Officials hope to open in the fall of 2011 or 2012.

In Carol Peavy's well-documented testimony to fellow alumni and loved ones that has appeared in university publications, the Dominican College nursing graduate and former UST nursing professor recounted her promise to a former nursing school dean that she “would not give up until St. Thomas was educating nurses again.”

But how, amid a national lack of nursing educators and an economic slump, has the University of St. Thomas found a way to reopen a nursing school that closed in 1986 during Houston's modern oil bust?

“The demand is overwhelming,” said Poldi Tschirch, a retired University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston nursing administrator. “There's a tremendous need for nurses,”

Tschirch was hired by the university last year to develop a curriculum and help it win accreditation from the Texas Board of Nursing to prepare students for the state's registered nursing exam.

Too few nursing educators means limited seats in Texas nursing schools. Every year, thousands of qualified students are turned away from nursing programs despite an estimated 11 percent nursing shortage statewide. That shortage is predicted to reach 26 percent in another decade.

For its faculty, UST leaders are hoping to tap the nation's supply of Catholic nurse educators as well as retired nurses. In its first semester, the new nursing school will admit about 40 students.

“I think that it's really unusual for a major city not to have a Catholic nursing program,” said Tschirch, who earned her bachelor's degree in nursing from a small Catholic school in Rhode Island. “St. Thomas is a different school. It's a small school. It's a liberal arts university. It's an experience that will be right for some students.”

For centuries, Catholic nuns and monks have devoted their ministries to caring for the sick and opening hospitals.

The legacy of a Catholic nursing school in Houston dates back to 1905 when the nuns who opened St. Joseph, Houston's first hospital, organized a nurse training program.

It's a profession, it's a knowledge discipline, but in our view, it's more than that — it's a ministry to others in service to God,” Tschirch said. “This is going to be a good place for persons to study how nurses support healing of body, mind and spirit.”

While digging through the Dominican archives recently, Sister Celeste Trahan found a photograph of herself checking a pregnant patient with a fetal stethoscope, a manual predecessor of electronic monitors.

The retired nurse midwife taught at UST in the mid-1970s after graduating from the Dominican College nursing program as well as a Catholic graduate program in St. Louis.

“Nursing education can be gotten in a lot of different places and ways,” Trahan said, “but when you have the tradition and heritage of Catholic, faith-based education along with learning the sciences, it gives you an added advantage.”

CATHOLIC NURSING EDUCATION IN HOUSTON

What became the University of St. Thomas School of Nursing began as a nurse training program at St. Joseph Hospital.

• 1905: Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word establish the city's first nursing program at what is now St. Joseph Medical Center

• 1947: The St. Joseph training transfers to Dominican College, later becoming the city's first baccalaureate nursing program

• 1972: The Dominican Colllege nursing program moves to the University of St. Thomas

• 1986: The University of St. Thomas School of Nursing closes, a casualty of the economic downturn

• 2008: Former UST nursing faculty member and Dominican nursing graduate Carol Peavy and her husband, Odis, donate $2.5 million toward re-establishing the UST nursing school

• 2009: UST hires Poldi Tschirch, Ph.D., a retired nurse administrator, as director of nursing program development

• 2012: The target deadline for UST to begin admitting nursing students


Source: University of St. Thomas