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The Miami
Vol. 92, Issue 37 | Feb. 27 - Mar 2, 2014
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HURRICANE
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STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI IN CORAL GABLES, FL A., SINCE 1929
Enthusiastic employee leaves legacy Director dedicates more than four decades to campus BY ERIKA GLASS MULTIMEDIA EDITOR
SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI HEALTH SYSTEM
Future facility to provide care for campus, community UHealth to expand operations near Ponce Garage BY ASHLEY MARTINEZ ASSISTANT EDITOR
The University of Miami Health System will break ground this summer on a four-story, 200,000-square-foot walk-in and specialty care center just south of the BankUnited Center (BUC). The project is slated for completion by 2016. The center will be located where the nowrazed sculpture building was, and take up part of the eastern end of the Wellness Center parking lot. This expansion aims to bring UHealth services, physicians and specialists to the
southern part of Miami-Dade County, said Joe Natoli, senior vice president for business and finance and interim chief operating officer of the Miller School of Medicine and UHealth. “It’s an important part of the community that we want to serve and has the added value of our own faculty and staff and students, so it has long made a lot of sense,” Natoli said. “We try to encourage our employees and their dependents to use UM doctors and facilities, and this will bring that care much closer to them making it a lot more convenient for them.” The new site also offers a closer healthcare option than traveling downtown to the UM medical complex for residents of Coral Gables, Kendall and other parts of South Dade. SEE UHEALTH, PAGE 4
When former Vice President for Student Affairs William Butler was hiring his staff in the early ‘70s, he knew he had his work cut out for him. “We didn’t have any residence colleges; we didn’t have the high rise towers; we didn’t have any cafeterias. All the PARSONS students would run across the street for their lunch and so there was a great opportunity to hire new staff with new visions and new energy and new directions because so much had to be done,” he said. Intramural sports was one such position Butler was charged with filling. He says that while they had a great program, there were no indoor facilities for students to use. His search to find a person to develop fitness aspects on campus led him to Norm Parsons. “One of the young men who came to the campus for an interview was Norm Parsons. And he made an immediate hit,” Butler said. “He had a great vision about the future, wanting to build and construct new facilities on the campus and so I invited him to come to the campus in 1972.” When Parsons first arrived at the university in 1972, the only athletic space was the Lane Recreation Center, which had two basketball courts, two saunas and two small weight and locker rooms. Parsons saw the need for something more. He says he got the idea to build the Wellness Center after attending a national wellness conference. “We were trying to build a building to replace the old Lane Recreation Center, which was a very small building that sat on the site of the current Wellness Center,” he said. “I always thought there had to be something else besides just recreation, and the term ‘wellness’ wasn’t even in the dictionary yet.” The center has come a long way since then. In 1996, Parsons commissioned the help of graduate and undergraduate student governments to write referenda to increase the activities fee to add $85 a semester to build the center. Then in 2011, Parsons headed an 18,000-square-foot expansion of the Wellness center thanks to the $8 million donation from Patti and Allan Herbert. “I like to say you get an education at the University of Miami, but you get a life at the Wellness Center,” he said.
SEE PARSONS, PAGE 3