Lyon College Dental School to Welcome First Students in June

Dr. Burke Soffe, dean of the Lyon College School of Dental Medicine: “This will provide a generational impact on oral health in the state.” (Karen Segrave)

On June 30, 80 students are expected to start taking classes at the Lyon College School of Dental Medicine in Little Rock as the state’s first dental school opens.

“This will provide a generational impact on oral health in the state,” said Dr. Burke Soffe, the school’s dean, as he showed off construction progress at 5 Allied Drive in the Riverdale neighborhood.

The school will occupy seven floors of the 12-story building that once housed workers with Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield and the telecommunications company Alltel.

The school intends to improve the state’s dismal dental health statistics. Arkansas ranks last in the country in dental health and second to last in dentist-to-population ratio.

And with the average age of dentists in Arkansas above 50, the dentist-to-population ratio is only going to get worse as dentists retire, Soffe said. “We aim to address the shortage of dentists.”

The school’s first class will graduate in 2028. That’s because the dental college planned its graduate program to be completed in three years instead of the standard four by having the students go year-round.

The school will add 80 students a year for two more years until it reaches its full capacity of 240 students.

The building will house classrooms, a simulation clinic and a 114-chair patient clinic. “Part of our mission is to provide a cost-efficient education and to provide cost-efficient oral health care for the underserved,” Soffe said.

Expanding Grad Schools

Lyon College President Melissa Taverner told Arkansas Business that the private liberal arts college in Batesville had been known as an undergraduate school for most of its 153-year history.

“But given the economics and the environment of higher ed right now, … we will continue to be an excellent liberal arts college for undergraduates, but we have to do more,” she said. “We have to be more because we need to serve where the needs are.”

When the college decided to expand into graduate education, it began by offering a Master of Arts in teaching in the fall of 2023 to address a shortage of teachers.

It then focused on health care and announced in 2022 that it was building a dental and veterinary school.

Initially, both colleges were going to be on the Heifer International campus in Little Rock.

But a deal to sell the Heifer campus to OneHealth Education Group of Little Rock fell apart in November 2023. OneHealth had planned to buy Heifer’s campus for Lyon’s schools. Taverner said the land deal collapsing didn’t rattle her.

Lyon ended up finding a location in Cabot for the veterinary school, and that is working toward a fall 2026 opening.

But Lyon wanted the dental school to stay in central Arkansas to have “a certain critical mass of population … so that our students can be trained to see a wide variety of situations,” Taverner said.

Taverner looked at several locations and decided on the 12-story building that had recently housed Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield employees. The building also featured a sizable parking lot and was on a bus line.

“When we drove up here, I thought a dental school can be here,” said Soffe, who received his medical dentistry degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Dental Medicine. “It felt very clear that this is what we needed to do.”

The renovation costs are $27.4 million. The construction manager is Baldwin & Shell of Little Rock, and WDD Architects of North Little Rock is the project architect.

The furnishing and equipment costs total $11 million, Lyon said.

Taverner said that the school received $15 million from the federal government to help cover the costs of construction. Lyon also is using reserves and gifts to pay for the school.

She said the tuition revenue, which is $102,000 annually per student, is expected to be enough to let the school break even the first year, but in following years, the school will be “financially viable.”

A key hurdle to opening the school was getting approval from the Commission on Dental Accreditation, which accredits dental education programs.

The Site Visit

The Commission on Dental Accreditation reviewed thousands of pages of documents for the proposed dental school and visited the site for the college in September.

“It went incredibly well,” Soffe said. “They gave us an unofficial report, which we couldn’t announce, because it was unofficial, until they voted on us at the end of January.”

But that didn’t stop Lyon from celebrating. “There were tears and high-fives and hugs,” Soffe said. “It was a moment for us at Lyon College, a moment for the state. I mean, a milestone that’s never been achieved despite efforts over the last 20 years.”

In the early 2010s, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences said one of its goals was to have a dental school. In 2013, it opened the UAMS Oral Health Clinic and operates dental hygiene and dental residency programs. But at the time, then-Chancellor Dan Rahn said a full dental school at UAMS was about eight to 10 years away.

In 2016, UAMS hired a consultant to study the feasibility of adding a dental school as many prospective dentists from Arkansas attend the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis for their dental training. (Tuition for the four-year dentistry school for in-state students for the 2024-25 school year was $31,738, and out-of-state tuition was $72,221.) UAMS didn’t move forward with plans for the school because of its costs and a decision to focus on other priorities.

Recruitment Begins

Lyon began recruiting students to the dental school in May 2024.

Most students apply to dental schools through a centralized application service, but Lyon couldn’t be a part of that service because it wasn’t an accredited dental school at the time. “So we developed our own system,” said Soffe.

He said Lyon recruiters went to all the pre-dental clubs and the universities and colleges in the state to get the word out about the college.

Potential students applying also knew that the dental school couldn’t start teaching until it received the accreditation from CODA.

So far, nearly all of the 80 students, 40% of whom are from Arkansas, have placed their deposit for the start of school in June.

Soffe said that other students are from neighboring states and beyond.

“We’re going to have people that fall in love with Arkansas [and] want to stay, which benefits our economy, obviously, and makes a big impact on oral health in the state,” Soffe said.