50+ Lifestyles

New Campus for Eastern Iowa Community Colleges

Eastern Iowa Community Colleges have a new campus on the west end of Davenport. Located at 2950 N. Fairmount St., next to the Davenport Library’s Fairmount Street branch, the center has been in the construction phase for over a year and is now open for business.

The new center serves as the venue for many different college activities including nurse aide training, college credit programming and adult basic education such as GED, literacy and English as a Second Language. The center will also deliver general interest continuing education classes, and its fully-equipped cooking lab provides space for the college’s “just for fun” cooking classes.

In addition to the cooking lab, the building includes four general classrooms, three general/public use classrooms, a nurse aide lab, GED lab, computer labs, tutoring areas and office space. In all, the facility is 19,400 square-feet in size and cost approximately $3,300,000.

Throughout the process, EICC has worked closely with the City of Davenport and the public library. Land for the
center was purchased by the college from the city of Davenport in July of 2010.

The majority of funding for the center comes from a 2007 bond referendum approved by the voters. EICC officials noted that the West Davenport Center is a key component of the bond referendum. The new center allows the college to better reach out to residents, not only into the western and northern parts of Davenport, but also to surrounding communities such as Blue Grass, Walcott and Buffalo.

Learning for the ages

Walk into any of our classrooms, day or night, and you’ll see a wide range of ages represented among our students. Many of them are young faces, straight out of high school, but just as many will have a few wrinkles around their eyes and maybe even some specks of gray in their hair. Older students choose to come to us for a wide variety of reasons:

• They’re working a job that just doesn’t challenge their abilities, or pay them enough, and they want more.
• They’ve been recently laid off from a job and need to learn new skills to find new employment
• They’re mothers who put off continuing their education until their children are in school.
• They’re currently working a job but want to upgrade their job skills for advancement.
• They simply are interested in learning a new skill or pursuing a particular area of interest.

The reasons are as many and as diverse as the number of our student. Each and every one has their own story to tell.

Whatever their reason, they all came to the same conclusion that there was a brighter future ahead and they needed additional education to get there.