Rochester colleges boost campuses with major upgrades

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It has been a busy summer across Rochester’s college and university campuses as construction, renovation, and modernization projects of all sizes were completed or continued.

“We really concentrated on infrastructure this summer,” said Rick Billitier, director of campus safety and facilities at Roberts Wesleyan University, who said his team went through almost all thirty-five buildings on campus over the past year to check and upgrade (when needed) heating and cooling. Davison Hall, which houses about 200 students, received new heating and hot water systems this summer.

This summer, Roberts Wesleyan also replaced the flat roof on Beeson Apartments with a pitched roof, which has several advantages such as efficiently shedding water and snow, promoting ventilation and enhancing the building’s structural integrity. The new roof on the apartments that house primarily upper-class students also matches the look of the school’s nearby Golisano Community Engagement Center, which opened in January 2023.

Also, this summer the Golisano Library at Roberts Wesleyan underwent enhancements including new study spaces, upgraded lighting, a sitting area and upgrades to the lower fireplace area.

“The Golisano Library is just a fantastic building on our campus — it’s beautiful and a great place for fellowship,” said Billitier, who noted the school’s clock tower and pond fountain lighting got an upgrade this summer as well. The pond fountain, which can be seen from Buffalo Road, now has multicolored lights that change with the seasons or special events.

St. John Fisher University is wrapping up a multimillion-dollar library modernization and renovation project on its Lavery Library, which will celebrate its grand reopening on September 4.

The library project — the largest capital project both in scope and investment in the institution’s history — includes enhancements like technology-rich classrooms, increased seating for student workspaces, flexible areas for quiet study, collaborative areas for group work and significant landscaping enhancements.

The university is also continuing enhancements related to its iFisher Next Generation Learning Initiative, which began in the Fall of 2021 and includes the modernization of classrooms across campus, and the Apple 1:1 initiative, which puts an iPad in the hands of every undergraduate student at St. John Fisher.

“The iFisher Next Generation Learning Initiative has been a commitment to the academic student experience, enhances student presentation skills and helps faculty think about the effectiveness of pedagogy in their classrooms,” Provost Dr. Kevin Railey said.

From twelve Bloomberg Terminals in the business school to a new athletic performance lab that opened last year, Railey said that when students and families visit campus they see a place that will prepare them for the workforce and help them develop the communication and presentation skills that they’re going to need, no matter what job they have.

The school also continues to enhance its athletic facilities, which are currently on display to a global audience via HBO’s Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Buffalo Bills, which was filmed at St. John Fisher this summer. Fisher recently made significant enhancements to its baseball and softball fields and introduced the Joseph Pellicano Wrestling Pavilion when the school re-launched its wrestling program in 2022.

“These investments in athletics attract different sets of students and add to the overall climate and culture on the campus,” Railey said. “They go along with the academic investments we’ve made because they enrich the quality of the student experience across the board.”

Jeff Tredo, market director of Bryant & Stratton College‘s Western New York and Rochester campuses, says the school, which has two campuses in Rochester, has been very busy renovating and enhancing facilities to meet the needs of its growing student body, especially in its nursing programs.

“We are a college that strives very hard to run programs that help to educate students so that they can fill high-demand jobs in the workplace, and nursing is one of the top on the list nowadays,” Tredo said. “We’ve been running an associate degree program in nursing at our Henrietta campus since 2021 and due to the growth of that program, we decided to invest in our Greece campus to add a state-of-the-art nursing lab.”

In May, the school moved its associate degree in nursing program from Henrietta to Greece and, at about the same time, received approval from New York State to run a practical nursing (PN) program. Its first cohort of PN students will begin at the Henrietta campus in September.

“Moving our associate degree program to Greece allowed us to make some additional investment in Henrietta, where we added some additional nursing beds, two more simulation mannequins, an incubator and a med dose machine,” Tredo said. “We also relocated our eSports lab from Greece to Henrietta.”

Bryant & Stratton recently also upgraded classrooms on both campuses with interactive televisions.

William Tehan, president of Pike Construction Services, says the recent construction and modernization projects on Rochester college and university campuses are in line with national industry trends as higher education institutions face challenges, including a declining birthrate.

“Those institutions that have solid financial footing are making what I would consider significant investments,” said Tehan, explaining that when competing for fewer students, colleges are seeing the value in spending on improvements to living spaces, libraries, classrooms and leisure spaces to differentiate themselves and attract students and tuition dollars.

Over the past several years, Pike has been busy working on renovation and/or new-build projects at local schools including the University of Rochester, Monroe Community College and the Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as other New York schools, such as  Colgate University in Madison County; Siena University (formerly Siena College) in Albany County and Marist University in Dutchess County.

“The other thing we’re helping out with a lot is master planning as people start to look out five to ten years and also helping, in some cases, institutions with an aging population of facilities professionals,” Tehan said. “Those facilities individuals have been key to keeping things up and running, but they’re aging out.”

Caurie Putnam is a Rochester-area freelance writer.