Susan Stone
Though Susan Stone’s organization is celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2014, the last few years have brought more students into Frontier Nursing University (FNU) than the school had seen in the many years since Mary Breckenridge founded it in Hyden, Ky., along with the Frontier Nursing Service.
“In 2004, we had 200 students total and today we have about 1,540, so it’s been a tremendous growth,” said Stone. A member of the faculty since 1993, Stone was promoted to dean and president in 2001, only to find herself needing to split the role in September by appointing a new dean for the school, which houses its administration in Lexington.
Frontier Nursing's sister health care service was sold in 2011 to Appalachian Regional Healthcare, at which point Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing became its own independent entity and changed its name to FNU.
Requirements placed on nurses
As the nursing profession has evolved, Stone said, the need for specialties and qualifications for nurses have too.
“We offer programs that [are] both master’s level and doctoral level. Once we were accredited to be an independent university offering master’s degrees and doctoral degrees, we needed to change our name to reflect who we are now,” Stone said.
At the point of the name change, the university had only been accredited as an independent school for seven years, after ending a partnership with Case Western Reserve in Ohio to allow for nurses to get certificates in Hyden and take courses at Case for their master’s degrees. Before that partnership, Frontier only awarded certificates.
“That affiliation worked out really well for us for about 10 years, but as we started to promote our distance education, we had students from Alaska, Hawaii and California,” Stone said of the booming distance-learning program, which she took part in as a student and later faculty member while living in Cooperstown, N.Y. Currently FNU has students enrolled in all 50 states.
Navigating a distance education
All FNU students start in Hyden for a four-day orientation then go back home and do courses online before returning to Kentucky to do clinical work as a part of an eight-day intensive course with faculty in Hyden. Following that, a regional faculty member will perform a clinical site visit in each student’s community, and the students must complete requirements of hours in practice and a number of individual procedures and patient visits.
The school has 35 faculty who focus on site visits as a part of their total of 90, which includes 20 to 30 staffers and faculty still working in Hyden.
Looking toward the future
Now that Stone has shed the dean duties to longtime Associate Dean Julie Marfell, she is beginning to focus on their twice-every-decade strategic planning process.
“I was appointed president and dean in 2001, and it was perfectly appropriate when we had 200 students and even maybe when we had 500 students, but this school is about the same size as Berea College. I think Centre has maybe 1,200 students, so it just wasn’t working any more for me to try to do both jobs,” she said.
“We could be 5,000 students in three or four years,” she said. “I know we could just because there [are] a couple of new programs we’d like to add — associate’s degree to bachelor’s degree — and we’d also like to add a psychiatric nurse-practitioner program. But we have to be real intentional and [remember] that our facilities are small — how do we manage the facilities and make sure that we’re doing the best we can for students,” she said.
One thing Stone said doesn’t concern her is FNU graduates walking away with worthless degrees.
“I just don’t have a fear that there won’t be a market for our graduates,” Stone said.
DNSc, CNM, FACNM, FAAN
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