KCU, Joplin celebrate completion of dental school

Jun. 26—The ribbon-cutting on Monday marked the completion of what has been a long time in the making, but those involved said the real countdown begins now for the faculty and staff at Kansas City University's College of Dental Medicine in Joplin.

Monday's event brought in the KCU board of trustees, city officials, Missouri Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, U.S. 7th District Rep. Eric Burlison, donors and health care officials from across the region to celebrate the completion and outfitting of the dental school on the Farber-McIntire campus at 2901 S. St. John's Blvd.

Dr. Linda Niessen, dean of the College of Dental Medicine, said she and her staff know full well the real celebration will come when the students are in class.

"We have this beautiful building and this amazing technology, but you don't have anything if you don't have students," she said. "This is what we've been building for. It's all about the students."

New students arrive

Sixteen of the 80 students who will live in Joplin for the next four years on their journey to becoming dentists were at Monday's ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Keaton Wilczynski, who grew up in Branson, completed her undergraduate program at Park University in Parkville, north of Kansas City, and said she's excited to be a part of KCU's first class of dental students.

"It is an incredibly proud feeling," Wilczynski said. "I'm incredibly proud and incredibly grateful to be able to represent the first class at KCU. I did my undergraduate work in three years, and I just knew that KCU was the school I desperately wanted to get into. It was my first choice. I love the morals and values behind it, and I honestly wanted to get a little bit closer to home. It has that sentimental touch of being closer to home."

Amara Mbionwu, another member of the first class, is moving farther from home in Bowie, Maryland, to attend KCU in Joplin.

"It's unreal," Mbionwu said. "I feel special, and I'm also proud and honored to lead the future dentists in this class. I found out about KCU through an email. The American Dental Education Association holds a yearly conference, and I got an email after one of those conferences, and KCU was one of the links in the email. So I clicked the link. It led me here, and I came to a campus visit, and I loved it."

Cutting edge

About 400 people attended the dedication and ribbon-cutting for the new school.

The crowd was standing-room-only in the large conference room where school officials and dignitaries spoke before the crowd braved the heat to see the cutting of the ceremonial ribbon.

After the ceremony, much of the crowd walked through the gleaming new hallways, which feature banks of cutting-edge dental technology.

The simulation lab features 84 stations with dental trainers featuring models of human heads, torsos and teeth to demonstrate how to properly and comfortably, for both the patient and dentist, examine a person's mouth.

The models can accurately simulate dental decay, periodontal disease and root canals in patients, a school handout said.

Other rooms feature intra-oral cameras which will allow still pictures and videos of a patient's mouth. This tool will help assess and diagnose plaque formations, cavities and gum disease, chipped or cracked teeth, and other dental problems.

"My favorite new technology for the patient's benefit is the intra-oral camera," Niessen said. "Remember when we used to, if you needed a crown or a bridge, we'd put all that goop in your mouth. With the intra-oral camera, we put a little wand in and take a picture and we capture in digital form what we used to capture in an analog form with the impression material. So I think that technology is probably the patient's favorite."

Niessen said the new CT scanning technology offered at the school is another improvement in dentistry.

"You have a three-dimensional view of the patient's mouth," Niessen said. "What that allows us to do is to do root canals much more precisely than we could in the past and to place implants more precisely. An X-ray is a two-dimensional model of the three-dimensional environmental. So the CT scan gives you that three-dimensional environment so you know exactly where to place the implant and the size of the implant you need."

Impact

KCU President Marc Hahn talked about the financial impact of the new school on the Joplin area, including about $45 million in estimated annual impact on the Joplin region from the school, the creation of about 200 jobs and the estimated $1.7 million in taxes the school will generate.

Hahn also said Missouri needs about 700 new dentists to provide care in underserved areas of the state.

Dr. Sheila Riggs, a member of the KCU College of Dental Medicine advisory board from the University of Minnesota College of Dentistry, said the students at KCU will have a chance to reduce that number.

"One of my favorite mantras is 'Numbers tell, but stories sell,'" Riggs said. "In just a few short years, in 2027, there's going to be 80 sets of stories coming from these students around the prevention they've provided, around the pain they've taken care of, around the smiles they've restored."