Tallahassee State College debuts new state-of-the-art dental lab
Tallahassee State College student Terah Young is one of about 50 students – and the oldest in her class – to be getting hands-on learning experience through the TSC Dental Hygiene Program’s state-of-the-art lab.
It took the 41-year-old Tallahassee native some time to find the right field of study, but she found it through dentistry at TSC’s recently upgraded program, which includes a new dental lab with equipment that puts the college on the cutting edge of technology.
“After working on the nursing side of the healthcare field, I realized I wasn’t interested in being a nurse but still wanted to work in healthcare,” Young said. “It was a happy medium for me to still use the experience that I have on the medical side while getting new experience at the same time.”
TSC’s dental lab on campus – previously a classroom – was opened this fall and is part of the college’s nearly 50-year-old Dental Hygiene Program, which prepares students to become dental hygienists and dental assistants within two years.
It took TSC a little over a year to establish the lab after receiving a $1 million grant from the Florida Job Growth Grant Fund, an economic development program that supports workforce training in the state.
“We haven’t had any updates in our dental materials lab in a while, so we wanted to have something more current,” said TSC Dental Hygiene Professor Debra Burtoft, who is also a clinical coordinator in the program. “This allows our students to work with things such as ultrasonic scanners and simulators to learn to clean, scale and polish teeth.”
The dental program has consistently had 100% certification passing rates in the past several years, according to a TSC Student Achievement report, and accepts up to 30 dental hygiene students for each of its two cohorts. It currently has 27 first-year students and 24 second-year students as well as 12 dental assisting students.
While a dental assistant works with a dentist side by side – handing them instruments and assisting during procedures – a hygienist works independently to perform tasks such as cleaning and x-rays. The average starting salary for dental hygiene graduates is $67,870 while the starting pay for dental assistants is $41,170, according to the college.
Throughout the lab there are 30 new dental simulators, where each one has a lifelike mannequin head attached to it for students to work on developing instrumentation skills.
“This gives them the opportunity to practice these skills before working on a real patient,” Burtloft said.
Other TSC news:TSC fall commencement to mark the college’s first graduating class since its renaming
‘A benefit for everyone’
In addition to the lab, the TSC program also has a Dental Hygiene Clinic that accepts patients in order to help the community while accomplishing the primary goal of fostering student learning. Patients are assigned to students based on the student’s level of expertise, according to Burtloft.
“Some patients are really easy – they might come in and hardly have anything on their teeth, which makes it easy to clean,” Burtloft said. “Other patients come in and might need some deep cleaning, and that would be for students who are further along in the program.”
Standard cleaning and X-rays cost a maximum of $15 with single tooth X-rays costing as little as $5, and dental examinations are free. Also, patients are not required to have insurance, and the clinic only accepts cash payments.
Individuals first schedule a screening appointment of about an hour followed by a scheduled cleaning of three to four hours, where students who provide care are overseen by faculty.
“These are students, so it always takes longer than it does in a private practice,” Burtloft said. “It might save patients thousands of dollars to come here, but we need their time versus their money.” In the spring, the dental program’s students provided care for 150 to 200 patients a week.
“We’re grateful that we can help the community as our students are learning,” Burtloft said. “It’s a benefit for everyone.”
Bettering people’s lives ‘through their smile’
For some of the students in TSC’s dental program, their collegiate journeys started at a university before enrolling into the Tallahassee college in efforts of changing their career paths.
Young graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s in psychology in 2005 and moved to Tampa, where she stayed for about 15 years and worked as a nursing assistant before moving back to Tallahassee to be a part of the college’s dental program.
Although she says she was a bit unsure about making the right choice of pursuing a career in the dental field, the hands-on experience – such as learning to use anesthesia and laughing gas – gave her more confidence.
“This type of patient care was one reason why I wanted to stay in healthcare,” said Young, who cared for about 50 patients since the spring. “I wanted to see a happier patient population after working with sick patients in mental health for several years, and I’m grateful God landed me in this program.”
Another student, Tallahassee native Sereena Kurdi, used to work with kids as a behavioral technician, where she would notice that many of the children had bad oral health.
Her decision to help kids and other individuals improve their dental health led her to TSC’s program.
“I want to better people’s lives through their smiles,” said Kurdi, 22. “I feel like your oral health is the opening to everything else, and you can tell so much by someone’s smile and oral hygiene.”
This year, Josh Gowen is the only male student in his cohort since TSC’s dental program usually has a majority of female students over males, according to Burtloft.
At first, Gowen – who received a bachelor’s degree in public health last year from the University of North Florida – thought he wanted to be a nurse. But after shadowing a dental hygienist, he fell in love with the dental field.
As a second-year student in the dental program, he is set to graduate in the spring along with the other students in his cohort.
“Learning to use the instruments in someone’s mouth and making sure I’m adapting correctly is kind of like learning a new language,” said Gowen, 23. “But it feels really good to be doing the same stuff that we would do every day in practice.”
How to make an appointment
Contact Tarah Jean at [email protected] or follow her on X: @tarahjean_.
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