ROD THOMPSON / RTHOMPSON@STARBULLETIN.COM UH-Hilo Chancellor Rose Tseng handed a flower to student Tiffany Pavao, left, on Tuesday in front of the new University Classroom Building. Looking on were student Chase De Sa and Gerald DeMello, director of university relations.

UH-Hilo’s new
classroom the real deal

A mock courtroom and hospital
are some of the new features

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By Rod Thompson
rthompson@starbulletin.com

HILO >> The University of Hawaii at Hilo's new $19 million classroom and office building has a mock courtroom with a judge's podium and jurors' seats.

Political science students will learn courtroom procedures, said political science professor Phillip Taylor.

The new building also offers a series of nursing classrooms designed to resemble a hospital room, a doctor's office, and a patient's bedroom at home, said nursing program head Cecilia Mukai.

"A lot of care is being moved into the community. People are much happier in their homes," she said, explaining the home setting.

Besides regular classrooms and offices, the building features a large, semicircular, glass-walled meeting room called "the informational display area."

Its actual use will extend to a book-signing by former White House reporter Helen Thomas on Wednesday and perhaps Board of Regents meetings some day.

As a whole, the building means pride for UH-Hilo.

Chancellor Rose Tseng said she expects the three-story structure to become the "signature building" for the school.

Sitting on rising ground at the campus entrance, glowing in a fresh cream color contrasting with darker adjoining buildings, it is destined to be the first building that comes to mind when people think of UH-Hilo, Tseng believes.

Unlike other campus buildings named for former dignitaries, the new building carries, at least temporarily, the workaday title of University Classroom Building.

It has not even been officially dedicated yet, although classes are already being held there.

Taylor's mock court class is scheduled to start in the spring.

"Half or more of political science students are pre-law," Taylor explained.

The class will be a dose of reality.

"This is what it's going to take if you want to be a trial lawyer," he said.

Nursing has its own realities. The hospital-like classroom offers in-the-wall attachments for suction tubes and simulated oxygen, actually plain air, Mukai said.

The wall attachments "prevent us from having to trip over equipment," she said.

The nursing program had none of this in its old classrooms.

"We have running water now!" Mukai said.