The next 10 years at College of the Canyons could see big changes at its Valencia and Canyon Country campuses as the college moves forward with facility plans and branding changes.
At the Valley Industry Association’s monthly luncheon at the Child and Family Center Tuesday, COC Superintendent-President Jasmine Ruys gave VIA members a rundown of how the college is expanding its health care career training and evaluating its campus facilities for overhauls.
The Valencia campus’ Advanced Technology Center project figures prominently in COC’s facilities planning, as the college waits for the Division of the State Architect to approve the permanent ATC’s building plans.
Ruys, who recently took the helm at the college in March after about six months as interim superintendent-president — and several years before that in the college’s student services — said that her ethos has been about centering students when it comes to the direction of the college’s programming.
“I really make decisions based on what’s best for students,” Ruys said. “When everything is laid out, if it might be a little harder for us, but it makes the students’ lives 1,000 times easier, let’s do that.”
Ruys announced the college has nearly finished Canyons Compass, a plan for the college’s facilities, campus design and branding over the next 10 years, and it includes a possible roadmap for reimagining the college’s campuses for ease of navigation and facility updates that reflect feedback collected from students over the past several months.
At the college’s regular board meeting on May 13, consultant Deborah Shepley from the design firm Gensler presented a potential future design plan for Valencia’s campus that, by removing, repurposing and adding a handful of buildings, grouped facilities by function — including “zones” for student services, instruction, athletics and performing arts.
Canyons Compass has been in the works since last summer, contracting with Gensler for planning services since October last year.
“We’ve taken the last year to go over all of our facilities … some of them were built in the early ’70s,” Ruys said. “So it’s time for us to look at retiring those buildings, building new ones, (and) really updating them to today’s standards for education. We’ve renovated as much as we can. Now it’s time to replace.”
The plan will be presented at the governing board’s June meeting, with a final reading scheduled in July.
Ruys also highlighted the suite of new health care training programs that’ve started or are slated to start soon at the college’s Canyon Country campus, as well as the programs moving over to the campus in the near future: nursing, medical lab technician and phlebotomy programs are set to move to that campus in the fall of 2027, Ruys said.
“We are going to rebrand our Canyon Country campus as our health professions campus,” Ruys said. “Now our students can start a program at Canyon Country Campus and make it all the way through their health professions. They never have to take a class somewhere else.”
The campus’ new health care training simulation center held its ribbon cutting ceremony at the campus’ Don Takeda Science Center in April.
“Our sim lab for our nurses … looks like a hospital room when you walk in,” Ruys said, adding that the lab’s life-like mannequins are perfect for simulating patients: “You could do CPR on them. Their stomach grumble, they make moaning noises, they have facial hair. It’s creepy, but the students love it. The staff love it.”
But as far as the Valencia campus goes, the ATC building is still its flagship project, as the college puts its weight behind career education programs — including a new Commercial Driver’s License program, with its first cohort scheduled to begin training this July.
Ruys said the college expects the Department of the State Architect will approve the ATC’s building plans some time in June or July, and will request and approve bids for construction this summer.
Construction is expected to begin this fall and wrap up by the summer of 2028.
The ATC’s construction and equipment are estimated to reach about $75 million. Though the college’s latest bond, Measure E, still has about $85 million available for spending, Ruys said she’s pursuing other funding sources to help with ATC costs, including federal appropriations, corporate donations and grants from the college’s foundation.
“We’re working on making sure that it’s more than just the bond that is working for us. We have so much that needs to be done with that last $85 million of the bond, that it should not go 100% to this,” Ruys said. “We’ve asked a lot of this community, we love that they have contributed through bonds for us, but there’s a lot to do.”
