By Ken Jackson Staff Writer
The Board of Osceola County Commissioners on April 8 agreed to sign agreements with UCFs School of Medicine and a new vocational school coming to St. Cloud.
The latter is a new interlocal agreement to partner with the city of St. Cloud to provide $650,000 for capital improvements to a St. Cloud-owned building that will house a private university that offers degrees in the medical field.
Part of the 10-year agreement hammered out is that St. Cloud will pay the Greater Osceola Partnership for Economic Prosperity (GOPEP) $50,000 in each year that the school is at that location, a former office complex and school located south of St. Cloud Hospital. St. Cloud will pay the county $65,000 for every year that the institution is not operating.
The motion passed 4-1 after Commissioner Brandon Arrington amended it, providing that the $50,000 be used as incentive dollars for projects county-wide rather than the operation of GOPEP.
Commission Chairman Frank Attkisson noted the school, a satellite campus of American Institute College of Health Professions, would offer four-year degrees with graduates that will earn $50,000 to $90,000 per year and will potentially have a local economic impact of $18 million.
The city of St. Cloud is starving for a four-year institution, he said. This is literally a godsend. Hopefully it will prosper and be a lead in education and not just in St. Cloud.
Representatives of the school and Premier Education Group, an umbrella organization for vocational schools of this nature, said the graduation rates of their schools are between 75 and 80 percent, with a 72 to 80 percent job placement rate, both meeting the benchmarks needed to retain federal funding they receive.
But when questioned by the commission on whether credits earned at the school could be transferred to another school, such as UCFs School of Medicine, they said that there was no agreement already in place for that.
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County signs agreements for medical school in St. Cloud