Monday, June 27, 2005 | 8:49 a.m.
RENO -- Need braces? Want to get them for half-off?
That's the pitch UNLV School of Dental Medicine officials are making right now in preparation for the opening of the school's first advanced residency program in orthodontics in August.
The two-year program will train dentists in the specialty through a new clinic, Dean Pat Ferrillo said, via phone from the Las Vegas Shadow Lane campus.
The clinic will offer orthodontic care to the general public for half of the typical cost to patients willing to be worked on by orthodontists-in-training, Ferillo said. The new clinic will also serve Medicaid patients.
Through March of fiscal year 2005, the regular dental clinics have served 41,000 patients, Ferrillo said.
All of the students in the program are full dentists, Ferrillo said. The university received about 120 applications for the 16 initial spots despite only advertising the opening of the school in February.
The new program will provide services to the community it wouldn't have had otherwise, Ferrillo said, and it will also bring another caliber of specialized faculty to the dental school.
"It enhances the quality of the education," Ferrillo said.
The Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents tentatively approved plans to move forward on a new facility for the program at the board's meeting in Reno on Friday, but not without regents again questioning the private-public partnership that made it all possible.
On Thursday Regents approved the hiring of Lynn Hurst, currently the program director for the orthodontics program at the University of Texas San Antonio Health Sciences Center, to run UNLV's program.
Regents approved the partnership with Orthodontics Education Ltd. in May 2004 only after Jim Rogers, then interim chancellor for only about two hours, stepped in and defended the program. Regents had questioned a provision of the partnership that would give scholarship money to students in exchange for those students later agreeing to work for the private company.
Under the plan, about half of the 16 dental residents in the program will receive about $65,000 a year for their tuition and living expenses, and UNLV will receive a $30,000 kickback for each person, Ferrillo said.
The private Orthodontics Education also gave UNLV $3.5 million in start-up money to fund the program and to build a new 40,000 square-foot facility.
Several regents saw the scholarship provision as indentured servitude because it tied students to the company for several years after graduation. But UNLV officials argued that the stipends from Orthodontics Education made it possible for some students to become orthodontists who would otherwise not be able to afford the program.
UNLV, likewise, could not expand its dental school without the help of the private company, Rogers, now the permanent chancellor, and UNLV President Carol Harter said at the time.
The $3.5 million will now be used as collateral in pursuing a lease-purchase or an installment-purchase arrangement to build a new facility on the Shadow Lane campus, Gerry Bomotti, vice president for finance, said. The facility will hold the new orthodontics program and later other advanced dental residency programs in peridontics, endodontics and oral surgery, Ferrillo said.
Regents gave UNLV permission to pursue bids for a lease-purchase or install-purchase arrangement to build the facility, which allows the university system to leverage the funds it currently has, Rogers said.
Under the plan, a private, non-profit company will own the building and contract with a developer to build it. UNLV will then lease the space for a period until ownership reverts back to the university, or the university will own the building and pay the cost back in installments much like a home mortgage, Bomotti said.
The dental facility will be the first of its kind to be built this way for the university system, Bomotti said, but Rogers is researching developers who specialize in lease-purchase arrangements for other projects in the system. The Tamkin Development Corp. made a presentation to the regents on Thursday afternoon, and Chevron-Texaco will be presenting in September.
Regents Steve Sisolak and Mark Alden, however, questioned whether the dental facility was the right project to try out a lease-purchase arrangement. They both said they feared what happened if UNLV lost funding from the Orthodontics Education company.
Bomotti said that once the orthodontics program is up and running, the tuition revenue and fees from the clinic would be able to support the lease costs of the facility.
Until that facility is built, the orthodontics program will be leasing space from the dental school to run its clinics, Ferrillo said. University officials have promised that the orthodontics program will be entirely self-sufficient without any state support.
The new orthodontics program is expected to get its initial accreditation from the Commission on Dental Education in July, Ferrillo said. The dental school itself is on track to receive its final accreditation visit next May, when the first class of 75 is slated to graduate.
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