Lyon College’s new dental and veterinary schools in downtown Little Rock are expected to have a $94 million economic impact from 2023-2025, and have already sparked discussions about new business and real estate developments in the area, project leaders said in a panel discussion Tuesday.
Renovations are already underway at the Heifer International building, which will be used for faculty office space, and construction for academic buildings for the dental and vet schools is expected to begin in August. Additional infrastructure for parking is also planned along with a building that will include an auditorium for large lectures and community events.
OneHealth Education Group of Little Rock, which is working with Batesville-based Lyon College on the project, announced last May it would purchase the Heifer International campus for an undisclosed sum.
The nonprofit will lease office space on the third and fourth floors. Once those renovations are complete, Lyon will start working on its office space on the first and second floors.
During a Rotary Club of Little Rock meeting Tuesday, Lyon College President Melissa Taverner said the dental and veterinary schools, called the Lyon College Institute for Health Sciences, could start recruiting students as soon as summer 2024. The first cohorts of students may arrive on campus to begin classes about a year later for the fall 2025 semester.
Taverner was joined by Merritt Dake, CEO of OneHealth Education.
“We are hoping this could be a catalyst for some development in the rest of the area,” Dake said. “The unique and interesting thing for the city is a lot of these people who are students will not be from Little Rock itself. There will be a new influx and then faculty will be establishing their lives here.”
That includes $36.6 million in labor income and a more than $55 million contribution to Arkansas’ gross domestic product. There will be 130 people directly employed as a result of the new schools and nearly 200 supported jobs created, the Lyon College impact study found. These initial projections do not include capital expenditures, students and related expenses.
Dake said he has been speaking with property owners near the nearly 30-acre project about ideas for hotels, apartments, retail spaces and new restaurants. The William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum and the Clinton School of Public Service are only a few minutes’ walk away. The area will soon be the home of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, which plans to build a $9 million, 20,000-SF music center nearby.
Both the dental and vet schools are still undergoing the accreditation process. In January, Lyon announced Dr. Burke Soffe as the founding dean of the Lyon College School of Oral Health and Dental Medicine in Little Rock. A counterpart for the vet school has not yet been selected.
Soffe is currently an assistant dean at the Roseman University of Health Sciences College of Dental Medicine in Utah. He officially starts at Lyon on July 1.
Should accreditation for both programs be approved, Taverner said she expects there to be about 100 students in the first cohorts of each school for the inaugural fall 2025 classes. That number will continue to increase gradually in the second and third years, she said.
The pedagogical structure of each program is one called a “distributed model” which emphasizes clinical experience for students and limits the amount of time spent in the classroom. Students will learn basic sciences on campus and then focus the rest of their schooling with hands-on experience in dental or veterinarian offices, Taverner said.
“It reduces the amount of time commitment that students will have in the graduate program, but that is not a bad thing because it is increasing direct clinical experience,” she said. “We want to work in partnership with clinical placements because that is where the meat of the experience will come from.”
“The plan is when they graduate, they will have seen so many more different procedures than if they went to a traditional education of four years,” Taverner said. “They will be much better prepared once they are licensed to immediately be effective in the field.”
Taverner said students will have the opportunity to work with practitioners in Arkansas but there will also be partnerships formed with clinics across the country.
Funding for the project has been generated via the partnership with OneHealth Education which has been raising money via a group of investors, Dake said.
“Part of our partnership together is a funding mechanism with OneHealth which allows the programs to move forward,” he said. “Philanthropic donation is part of the plan and goal, but we didn’t make it necessary so we would not have to stop [the project].”
Partnerships will also play a vital role for financing and also developing cost-effective resources. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Lyon signed a memorandum of understanding to work jointly on research, graduate education and professional development for the Lyon College School of Oral Health & Dental Medicine.
Delta Dental Insurance is another partner, Dake said, adding more will be announced in coming months.
The dental and veterinary schools would be the first in Arkansas.
The project's leaders said their goal is to train more professionals in those fields and keep them in the state for work. Taverner and Dake said Arkansas currently pays tuition for about 120 dental and vet students to go to programs in other states for training. Most of those students do not return to practice in Arkansas, which ranks one of the lowest in the nation for the number of dentists and vets per capita, Dake said.
“I think you will be pleasantly surprised with how affordable the tuition is,” he said.
“When you look at the number of students in Arkansas who are qualified to go into vet or dental school but they don’t get seats because there are not enough nationwide, this will help them,” Taverner said. “It will support homegrown professionals who are more likely to stay and alleviate some of the stressors we have in access.”
“That is what it really comes down to,” she said. “We want quality practitioners, and we want them to realize that staying home is a benefit to everyone.”
Arkansas State University in Jonesboro announced in January that it's also planning to start a veterinary school. Fall 2026 is the preliminary date for its inaugural class.
