WELDON — The Halifax Community College board of trustees received some good news at their Tuesday meeting

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Due to an unprecedented enrollment in the North Carolina Community College System, the state is giving back two percent of a five percent mandated reduction. And the Golden LEAF Foundation provided funding for the college’s Allied Health Project.

For HCC, this means $165,679 will be returned. “We’re very pleased with the Governor’s action,” said Dr. Ervin V. Griffin Sr., president of HCC.

The original cuts were $113,364 in the administration area; $91,369 in the curriculum area affected health science and technical education funding; $20,061 reduction in adjunct Adult Basic Education faculty hired this school year; reductions in the Small Business Center for the contracted instruction and categorical funding for non-salary expenditures; and $179,723 reduction in capital outlay for equipment and books for the library.

Deborah Armstrong, HCC vice president of administrative services, said the money will be put back into areas where the five percent was taken.

“It will not be dollar for dollar,” she said. “We tried to fairly prorate it.”

Griffin thanked the board passing a resolution opposing the five percent reduction because the college is not a state agency and shouldn’t be included in the executive order.

HCC received $100,000 from the Golden LEAF Foundation for the college’s Allied Health Simulation Lab Enhancement Plan.

Griffin said this funding, along with $190,000 from Congressman G.K. Butterfield and other money, will create one of the most technologically sophisticated nursing simulation labs in the region.

“We appreciate the fund sources,” he said. “This has been a lot of work from a lot of people.”

The college is creating a state-of-the art, on-site Human Patient Simulator Lab for the training of nursing students in a “virtual clinic setting.”

Currently, HCC students are served by a lab which simulates a 1960s hospital experience.”

Griffin said the new lab will provide hands-on, participatory learning through the use of technologically advanced mannequins in a setting that stimulates a modern health care facility.

“This lab will not only help our RNs and LPNs, but also it will help us with our CNAs and all the training we will be doing with our police and fire departments and EMTs,” he said. “It will be something that will be helpful to all of us.”

Students will have the opportunity to perform the procedures they read about in textbooks, which will give them increased clinical skills, he said.

There will be an open house in January or February, so the public can see what the lab will look like.