Patrons craft aid for nurses
Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/220731/
Full scholarships endowed by six- or seven-figure private gifts often make news for the University of Arkansas, but sometimes a more modest donation still can impact students.
Especially when such a gift is crafted to address two kinds of need at once.
A Fayetteville couple, Ellen and Guy Brown, recently retooled and expanded an endowment fund they established in December 2005 for nursing scholarships.
The move allowed them to help more nursing students, but it also enabled them to assist UA in an effort called Access Arkansas, which raises money for need-based scholarships at the Fayetteville campus.
The original $ 25, 000 gift that set up the Ellen Tarshis Brown Access Arkansas Scholarship is the minimum amount needed for an endowment at the university, said Jamie Banks, development director at UA’s College of Education and Health Professions. The minimum to establish an Access Arkansas endowment is $ 50, 000.
“And that’s where the story about the Browns’ gift is a little unique,” Banks said.
The couple’s original endowment criteria included a preference that nursing applicants demonstrate financial need, but it was not a requirement.
“Then, over the course of time since the donation, as they have been able to watch this endowment come to life, they decided they wanted to give an additional $ 25, 000,” she said.
In talking with UA development officials on how best to make the second donation, the Browns learned they were able to roll their 2005 endowment into the new gift to meet the minimum level of the Access Arkansas endowment program, which didn’t begin taking gifts until July 1.
Ellen Brown, a retired nurse, hopes the contribution she and her husband made will inspire donors large and small to help combat a nursing shortage affecting Arkansas and the rest of the nation.
“Because we’re not wealthy people,” she said, “I’m hoping people will say, ‘If the Browns can give, we can, too.’ “ I’m hoping to stir up some of these retired nurses.”
$ 15 MILLION DRIVE When UA announced the Access Arkansas program in November, more than four months after its inception, it signaled a shift in scholarship focus since the time its seven-year capital campaign ended in June 2005. “We had enormous fundraising success in the Campaign for the 21 st Century,” Banks said, and scholarships were one area that reaped benefits from the more than $ 1 billion raised. “But the majority of that was merit-based, not need-based.” Students who receive needbased scholarships have to meet UA’s admission criteria, UA officials said.
The five-year, $ 15 million Access Arkansas campaign has so far raised $ 930, 000, said a UA spokesman, Laura Jacobs.
Other gifts to the needbased scholarship campaign announced this year have included $ 50, 000 from UA Chancellor John A. White and his wife, Mary Lib, for universitywide teaching scholarships and $ 50, 000 from J. Stephen Lauck of San Francisco for a scholarship fund in the Sam M. Walton College of Business.
The Browns’ first endowment has provided scholarship aid to two students, thus far, Jacobs said. Their newly established Access Arkansas fund will begin by helping a third student, who will be selected later this spring.
One of the benefactors of the Browns’ original 2005 endowment, Matt Burrous of Tontitown, said the scholarship was one of two that financed his UA nursing education, along with Pell Grants, student loans, military benefits and part-time jobs.
“It was just a small scholarship for one semester — but it came at a most important time, during my last semester at school,” Burrous, 26, said Thursday.
“It allowed me to work less and study more, and have more strategically planned days off right before major exams,” added Burrous, who graduated in December and is a nurse at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville.
“The Browns are awesome people,” he said, adding he’s studying for his Arkansas nursing certification. He met the couple when they attended his December pinning ceremony.
“I just hope to someday be in their position to give back.”
The other benefactor, Jessica Mills of Bella Vista, said her scholarship from the Browns totaled roughly $ 500, enough to help her pay for books. She earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing in December. She worked as a licensed practical nurse for her current employer, Northwest Medical Center-Bentonville, before her degree. But after she passes her state certification, she’ll be able to work as a registered nurse. “I’m a nontraditional student, so I don’t qualify for other scholarships,” Mills said. “That was the only one that I got.”
ENROLLMENT GOALS UA’s College of Education and Health Professions doesn’t have its own nursing scholarships that cover most or all of a student’s tuition, fees and other expenses for a full four years, Banks said.
Nursing students would have to earn UA awards such as Bodenhamer Fellowships, Walton College Fellowships or Chancellor’s Scholarships for that, she said.
And, most of the college’s existing nursing scholarships are merit-based.
The college has about a dozen endowments specific to nursing that currently offer scholarship aid to 80 to 90 nursing students, figures that don’t include other UA or external scholarships, Banks said.
Reed Greenwood, the college’s dean, said that while he would love to increase the endowed scholarships, the nursing program has other needs just as critical to its goals.
“We have made a major effort to increase our enrollment,” he said, and that took assistance in more areas than scholarships.
Increasing the number of nursing students — and ultimately, the number of nursing graduates — would help for several reasons.
It would be one way for UA to tackle its 2010 goal of increasing overall enrollment to 22, 500 students. Between fall 1997 and fall 2007, enrollment grew from 14, 740 students to 18, 648. It would also help the university continue improvement on its ability to retain students and increase its graduation rate.
Perhaps more importantly, increasing enrollment in the campus’s Eleanor Mann School of Nursing would help address a national nursing shortage that effects Arkansas.
The American Nurses Association contends the current workforce of nurses and nursing instructors is aging, and has expressed concern there aren’t enough replacements in the education pipeline.
It estimates the average age of employed registered nurses is 43. 3 years, and that registered nurses younger than 30 represent just 10 percent of the total working-nurse population.
In addition, the National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice has recommended that, by 2010, at least two-thirds of registered nurses hold baccalaureate or higher degrees.
The UA college has had some success in recent years toward the goal of increasing its nursing enrollment.
“When I became dean in 2001, I sat down with our academic department heads,” Greenwood said. “I learned there was a limit on how many nursing students could be admitted in their junior year.”
So some students who had completed their first two years of pre-nursing at UA couldn’t complete their nursing degree there, he said.
Accreditation requirements demand one nursing instructor for every 10 students while doing their clinical internships in hospital and clinical settings, he said, and these internships begin during the junior year. A shortage of instructors is more critical here than in a lecture setting, where larger classes can be taught.
“If we could get some more money for clinical faculty, we could expand enrollment,” Greenwood said of his 2001 dilemma.
White and UA Provost Bob Smith agreed with the dean, allowing Greenwood to add perhaps 15 more part-time clinical supervisors for the students.
“We’ve gone from 30 to 35 juniors in fall 2001 to 90 to 100 juniors in fall 2007,” he said. All together, the college has more than 550 students in the four-year program, which offers a bachelor of science in nursing. “We’ve had exponential growth in that program,” Banks agreed. “And it’s taken public and private resources to do that. We’ve had to increase faculty support and clinical supervision.” So it’s not just a matter of getting the students there, she said, and future enrollment growth also would depend on increasing nursing instructors.
‘OBLIGATION TO HELP’ One of Ellen Brown’s reasons for endowing the scholarship was personal.
“I used a need-based scholarship many, many years ago,” she said. “And I couldn’t have gone to nursing school if I didn’t have that scholarship.”
The $ 500 scholarship covered three years of schooling.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Loretto Heights College in Denver. A Vietnam veteran, she was a U. S. Air Force nurse for 14 years.
She found it gratifying to meet Burrous and Mills — to see the faces of the people her scholarship had helped, she said, adding she was told that all 45 students who graduated that day in December had secured jobs the next day.
“I really got to see how my money was spent,” she said.
The other reason for the gift relates more to a world view.
“I’m really trying to get more people into the nursing program, and so if I do, I have an obligation to help them,” Brown said.