Posted by director of administration DIANNE KELLY – In March of 2004, Dr. Tom Bruce asked me to join him in a very exciting assignment – to get the Clinton School of Public Service up and operational. Plans for the school had been formulated years before, but were put on hold because of a delay in the actual construction of the Clinton Presidential Library.
We were to be housed with the new UAMS College of Public Health, which itself was located in temporary housing in the Freeway Building west of the UAMS campus awaiting completion of its new building on the UAMS campus. There was not one spare office in the Freeway Building, so Dr. Bruce obtained vacant space at the University Tower Building located at 12th and University. From there, in a period of 17 months, we moved two more times before arriving at Sturgis Hall on the grounds of the Presidential Library and Park in September 2005.
It was an easy move since the legislature had not yet appropriated our permanent funds and our belongings were scant. For desks, Dr. Bruce and I borrowed a dozen rectangular tables from the UAMS Student Union and transported them to Sturgis Hall in my husband’s pick-up truck. There was a picture of Senator David Pryor, the school’s founding dean, in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette carrying his own box of desk supplies into the building on that day in September 2005.
Also on that day, we added one new full-time employee, making a total of four, and with a few volunteers and some part-time staff, the process of selecting the first class (to enter Fall 2006) began.
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