The Forum

Florissant Valley’s two new buildings were expected to both partially open in January 2025 for the spring semester, as The Forum reported last fall. However, as new and returning students arrived at the campus weeks ago for the new semester, only one building, the Nursing and Health Sciences Center (NHSC), opened to students and faculty. The Advanced Manufacturing Center (AMC), Flo Valley’s other new building, remains closed and under heavy construction. 

After hearing rumors that the AMC didn’t open when previously planned, I reached out to Campus President Elizabeth Perkins to ask about the status of the building. According to Perkins, “the very cold weather and significant snow caused major delays in work that compounded and delayed other work that needed to be completed.” The spring semester opening of the AMC was always intended to be partial, and only a limited selection of the building’s total classrooms and offices were planned to be occupied. The intention for the Advanced Manufacturing Center, as Perkins put it in an email, “was always to begin more fully in fall 2025.” Moving classes into the building will likely be delayed until March of this year, said Perkins, but she still expects the building to completely open next semester: “We will still need to move and install some of the heavy machinery over the summer for some of our programs, but we will have some limited classes and offices moved for a March open.”

Other portions of the campus are closed due to ongoing renovations. The Student Center remains off-limits following its closure on Dec. 20, 2025, and services previously hosted there have been temporarily relocated to other buildings. A scaled-down Campus Cafe is located in room SM250 of the Science and Math building, and a temporary Campus Store has been set up in SM263 in the same building.

I spoke to Julie T. Stillman, the Senior Manager of Auxiliary Services at STLCC, about Flo Valley’s temporary cafeteria, which she described as greatly successful. The cafe in the Science and Math building has seen heavy use, according to her, and she said that she had received a lot of positive feedback on it. Stillman said that it was a priority that any interim food service continues to provide hot food to students, and the Student Cafe has been able to do this through a complicated arrangement in the loading bay behind the Science and Math building as well as a simplified menu.

As Stillman described it, they reduced the cafe’s food offerings to the simplest and most popular items among students, as well as a rotating selection of slightly more complicated dishes. Cafeteria staff have been allowed to continue using their a walk-in cold storage unit–either a refrigerator or freezer–in the Student Center, which has been separated from the rest of the building during construction. This food is then transported across the construction parking lot and loading bay between the two buildings, where hot food is prepared in a small trailer. 

Portions of the Business and Engineering complex are also closed and under renovation, with entrances to those sections unavailable to students, though classes and offices are still being hosted in other sections of the buildings. Additionally, the Humanities building has been renamed the Arts and Communications building to better reflect the classes and faculty offices that the building now hosts following its own previous renovation.

Signs guiding students to the new, temporary locations of campus resources have been posted throughout the campus. While the Science and Math building houses the Campus Store and Campus Cafe, Campus Life and Access have been moved to the Administration Building, and The Forum, CCAMPIS, SARC, TRIO, Veterans Affairs, Black Male Achievers, Counseling, and New Student Services have been moved to rooms throughout the Communications Building.

These changes are part of STLCC Transformed, a college-wide construction project intended to reshape and revitalize the institution with updated facilities and programs.