When Lisa Nickles walked into Sinclair College, a two-year community college in Dayton, Ohio, six years ago, she thought she would find the additional training she needed to fulfill the requirements of a job she recently had taken. She didn't expect to make a discovery that would profoundly change the way she thought about that job and the manner in which she approached it.

Nickles had accepted a position at Rhodes State College — another two-year institution 75 miles due north in Lima, Ohio — as the chair of the emergency medical services department. At the time, she had nearly 25 years of experience as an EMT and a master's degree in education, which she had leveraged to spend 19 years working as a school administrator at the county level. She was looking for a career change, and the job at Rhodes seemed like the perfect opportunity.

However, there was only one problem. Nickles lacked the paramedic certification that would enable her — at least in the minds of the administrators at Rhodes — to effectively lead the paramedic program at the college. They hired her anyway.

“Their rationale was that it is cheaper to train someone as a paramedic than it is to put someone through four years of college to get a master's degree,” she said. “They said, ‘You have the most expensive part, so we'll work with you to get your paramedic's license.’”

Because of the rules associated with the national certification program, Nickles couldn't take the final exam at Rhodes. That's what led her down Interstate 75 to Sinclair College. And that's where Nickles saw it: a working ambulance built inside a classroom. The discovery hit Nickles like a lightning bolt, and she immediately was smitten. “I took pictures. Then I came back and told the administration at the time, ‘I want one of these — we need one of these.’”

First Things First

The timing for such an endeavor couldn't have been better. The college had received a $250,000 grant to renovate its nursing education facility, which abutted the space occupied by the EMS department. The plan was to enlarge the nursing area by moving the EMS department to a new lab that was being built on the campus. Nickles was given a clean sheet of paper to design the new EMS facility. The in-classroom ambulance simulator became part of that design.

That was the easy part. Finding the money to bring the vision to fruition was another matter altogether. It was slow going for quite a while, which forced Nickles to use the section of the classroom she had carved out for the ambulance simulator for storage. Then Dr. Debra McCurdy became president of the college. The project had the champion it needed.

“When we went to the budget meetings, she asked, ‘Why don't you have this,’” Nickles said. “Then she said, ‘We have to do this; we'll find the money.’ It got fast-tracked after that.”

The fund-raising effort was aided greatly by two local hospitals, Lima Memorial and St. Rita's Medical Center, each of which contributed $8,000 toward the nearly $60,000 total project cost.

Once the funding was in place, the next challenge was to find a contractor capable of bringing the dream to reality. That proved more daunting than anticipated. As it turned out, there weren't many companies capable and willing to take on such a project. As a government entity, the college is required to get three bids before it can hire any outside contractor. To get around that, Nickles had to secure letters from two companies stating they had no interest in the project.

Almost unbelievably, the one company willing to bid on the project was located just 33 miles away from Rhodes, in Van Wert, Ohio.

Life Star Rescue manufactures various types of ambulances and fire apparatus. More importantly for this project, the company also does remounts — refurbished boxes that are placed onto new chassis — which fit perfectly into Nickle's strategic vision. She had seen what Sinclair College had done and believed it could be improved on.

“They had contracted with a local construction company, which took apart an old ambulance and put it into the classroom,” Nickles said. “It actually cost them almost as much as what we ended up spending.”

Rhodes got bang for its buck beyond its wildest dreams because of Life Star's generosity, according to Nickles. While their bid called for a refurbished ambulance, the company ultimately decided to go above and beyond. “When the crew came, they got so jived up about it that they said, ‘Let's build one from scratch.’ And they didn't change the cost. So they donated a lot to this.”