Houston Community College officials opened a new Missouri City campus today next to city hall with a ribbon cutting that included city officials and local representatives.
“This location will provide ease of access and visibility on a more well-traveled thoroughfare,” HCC Chancellor Cesar Maldonado said as a crowd packed the ground level reception area of the new building, located at 1600 Texas Parkway, Missouri City.
The campus will initially offer programs in health care education, small-business entrepreneurship, computer coding and information technology, Maldonado said, adding that he expects course offerings to expand in the future.
“We’ll see what the community’s additional needs are and work to address them,” he said.
HCC recently closed its campus in Sienna Plantation at Sienna Parkway and Sienna Springs Drive, south of Hwy. 6.
The new campus is two stories tall and includes more than 67,000 square feet of space, said Cory Stottlemyer, media relations specialist for Missouri City.
Officials standing in front of the building's entrance wielded oversized, black-handled scissors to cut through a 1-foot-wide gold ribbon as Missouri City City Hall stood in the distance.
Madeline Burillo-Hopkins, president of HCC Southwest College, said between 1,000 and 1,100 students are projected to enroll in classes at the campus this fall. Officials expect enrollment to increase to about 3,000 students in the near future, she said.
“Missouri City leaders are proud to see a resurgence of development activity along the Texas Parkway-Cartwright Road corridor with HCC’s construction of a new Center for Entrepreneurship, Technology and Health,” Stottlemyer said.