Construction continues on the site of the new Arkansas State University campus in Mexico. The privately funded project is being run through a business foundation in Mexico called Arkansas State University Campus Queretaro. The group has purchased over two thousand acres for a comprehensive community development plan near Queretaro. The college campus will be the focus of the project, but it will also include commercial, residential, and recreational components for up to 70-thousand residents. A press release from Arkansas State University says substantial earth work has been done over much of where the campus will be, and steel beams are going up for the Student Union. Additionally, multiple levels of infrastructure are also being installed at this time. Mexican officials expect completion of the first phase of the campus to take place in 2017. The first phase of academic space for the campus is being designed to accommodate at least five-thousand students, with a goal of one-thousand students in the first year. Arkansas State becomes the first comprehensive American university in Mexico that has an American-style campus. The total cost of the entire campus is about $75-million dollars. You can see a video that highlights construction progress here.
Johnathan Reaves is the News Director for KASU Public Radio. As part of an Air Force Family, he moved to Arkansas from Minot, North Dakota in 1986. He was first bitten by the radio bug after he graduated from Gosnell High School in 1992. While working on his undergraduate degree, he worked at KOSE, a small 1,000 watt AM commercial station in Osceola, Arkansas. Upon graduation from Arkansas State University in 1996 with a degree in Radio-Television Broadcast News, he decided that he wanted to stay in radio news. He moved to Stuttgart, Arkansas and worked for East Arkansas Broadcasters as news director and was there for 16 years.