By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
University of Missouri officials say they suffered a setback, not a death blow to the idea of creating a dental school in St. Joseph.
It seemed certain a $7 million appropriation for the University of Missouri-Kansas City to establish a dental school in St. Joseph would pass during the legislative session this year. That is, until it didn’t
UMKC Chancellor, Mauli Agrawal, says the school still plans to start a dental school on the Missouri Western State University campus.
“It usually takes a little bit to collect all the money together to launch something this big and it will get done,” Agrawal tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post.
Agrawal says though UMKC didn’t get the money it expected during the legislative session, the project isn’t dead.
“Oh, no, no, we will continue to work at this,” Agrawal says. “It’s a very large project, as I said. It usually takes a little bit of time to get everything together. We have full intent to get this done. It may be delayed a little bit, but we’ll get it done.”
The dental school funding was one of the dozens of victims when the Missouri House Budget chair, Dirk Deaton of Seneca, unexpectedly skipped over House Bill 19 toward the end of the session, never bringing it to the House floor for a vote. The move even caught fellow House Republicans off guard. Deaton failed to give a hint to his own caucus that he never planned to allow the $513 million capital improvement package to come to a vote. Afterward, he simply said the state couldn’t afford the bill and there was nothing vital in it.
Though shocking, the move hasn’t shaken the commitment of UMKC to establish a dental school in St. Joseph or, at least, so it seems when talking with University of Missouri officials during their visit to St. Joseph for a Board of Curators meeting at the St. Joseph Country Club last week.
Agrawal says the university understands rural northwest Missouri needs dentists and dental hygienists, a point Agrawal says was made clear to him during visits throughout the region.
“Health care delivery is a need,” Agrawal says. “Both medicine and dental were brought up and since we are the only public dental school for the state it’s on us to see what we can do to address those issues.”
Agrawal says the success of the UMKC medical school in St. Joseph has provided momentum for starting a dental school on the Missouri Western campus. The model for the dental school would be different, according to Agrawal, with dental students spending two years on the Kansas City campus before finishing their training at the clinic in St. Joseph.
Agrawal says the failure of the capital improvement package in the last days of the legislative session is a mere setback for the proposal.
“None of these things work the first time around,” according to Agrawal. “Even the medical school, it took us a little while to get everything together and this one will come together. Almost did this time, but I’m pretty sure and confident that it will next time.”
UMKC has operated a medical school in St. Joseph on the Mosaic Life Care campus. It moves into a new building this fall.
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