A geographic information systems (GIS) project has gained extraordinary momentum in the two years since its Advanced Technological Education grant funding ended.  

J. Scott Sires, Dallas College geospatial technology professor, unpacks a drone purchased with an ATE grant he led.

The project led by J. Scott Sires, a geospatial technology professor at Dallas College’s Brookhaven Campus, has had these recent achievements:    

• A service learning experience that involved students in mapping part of Brookhaven Campus led to Dallas College hiring students as interns to create three-dimensional floor plans of facilities on   seven campuses and at 15 centers.
• During the first 16 months of this floor-plan mapping project, 10 interns completed scans of 80% of the college’s 5.5 million square feet of property. College administrators are pleased with the high quality, multi-use data that the interns have gathered more quickly than anticipated.  
• In July the college hired one of the interns as a facility space analyst. Sorting the field data to make it useful to facility managers and first responders is one of the tasks of this newly created role. The college’s chief facilities officer reports he would like to hire more GIS program alumni in the future.  
• The sequence of stackable GIS credentials—including an 18-hour dual-credit, high school program—that Sires developed from his ATE grant work was approved recently by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for statewide use.
• Other Texas higher education institutions are evaluating the intern training materials and the GIS curriculum for potential adoption and adaptation.
• Sires received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the GeoTech Center this summer.

Sires said the Mentor-Connect mentoring he received in 2017 to prepare the ATE grant proposal, which won a $224,000 grant by the National Science Foundation in 2018, has “led to some opportunities that now are blooming ... And so that’s exciting.”

Service Learning Leads to Innovative Deployment of Students’ GIS Knowledge & Skills   

About the time Sires was completing his final NSF grant report in fall 2022, he decided to embed a service learning project that would give students a holistic way to practice their GIS skills and learn how they fit into real workplaces.

“I thought, let's do this at full scale for several buildings or the whole campus or something, but let's really launch this thing working across courses the whole semester and just see what we can do as if I was running an engineering firm with all these young folks as my staff. And it was fantastic.”

Students in four courses worked in cohorts on different aspects of the project.

“It worked beautifully and the students worked together amazingly, and achieved more than my normal curriculum would have delivered. But at the same time they built something I didn't anticipate—which side note my advisors had been asking me to create—and that was ownership above and beyond the tactical steps of workflow at the moment, but to see the bigger picture,” Sires said.

Conversations with colleagues about this successful initiative led to Sires sharing information about it with Scott Wright, chief facilities officer of Dallas College.

At the time Wright was considering a vendor’s mapping proposal with an $800,000 price tag. The lack of accurate “as-built” floor plans of college facilities was a challenge that Wright had encountered since the independently accredited institutions in the Dallas County Community College District were consolidated as Dallas College in 2020.

Sires told Wright about the GIS program offered on the Brookhaven campus. During the meeting he scanned Wright’s office using a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) tool purchased with his ATE grant to demonstrate what students learn to do and the information that could be generated.

Wright was so impressed he suggested the college hire students to map the entire college. He asked Sires what equipment would be needed, and he subsequently purchased several hundred thousand dollars worth of GIS equipment that is used for teaching in the college’s lab and by the interns for the floor-plan mapping project.  

Help for the College & a Win for Students

Dallas College students map an historic cemetery using ground penetrating radar equipment purchased with an ATE grant.

Wright insisted the student interns be compensated as part-time employees because he wanted them to understand they were doing real jobs with expectations. The interns are currently paid $22 per hour and can earn academic credit in the GIS program’s practicum course.  

Work plans and training modules were devised during spring 2023 and in the summer the interns—wearing Dallas College Facilities Department insignia shirts—began scanning. They also entered lots of information that is important to facility managers on digital survey forms.

“So I now have accurate floor plans cross-referenced with all the attributes of the rooms, cross-referenced with utilization. So I actually have more than I ever thought,” Wright said, adding, the project has been a “great opportunity for the students, but it also helped me.”

He estimates having student interns do the “heavy lift” of traversing every interior and exterior space with state-of-the-art equipment saved the college millions of dollars.

He thinks it’s a win for students too. Aside from the money they earned, Wright expects the internship experiences will help them in their careers.   

“They have a great resumé now with actual work experience, and if they go get a well-paying job. ... You can hardly put a price tag on that,” Wright said. He would like to hire a few more GIS alumni as full-time employees for the next phase of the project, which is analyzing the data to inform space utilization and other decisions as it expands and updates facilities with the proceeds from a $1.1 billion bond.   

Star Intern Fills New Role on Dallas College Team   

Checking the field data against blueprints and other records and then combing it for other applications is being done by Valentin Leon. By all accounts an outstanding intern, Leon completed his geographic information systems technician certificate at Dallas College earlier this year and began work on July 1 as a space analyst for the college.

Leon had earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental geosciences from Texas A & M University and worked full time for three years as an engineering technician before enrolling at Dallas College in 2022. Until he was hired as an intern Leon continued working at the same engineering consulting firm while taking GIS courses part time. 

Kellie Wallace, who as Dallas College’s director of Space Management and Planning supervises the interns and Leon in his new role, said he had a “leadership aura” as an intern. He noticed if something was missed and helped other interns re-do scans or surveys as necessary. “He’s been a great asset to the whole program,” she said.

Wallace acknowledged that hiring students as interns to do a complex, high-tech project meant that ramping up probably took more time than it would with an experienced staff. And each semester brings some staff turnover.

However, she pointed out, that the students have responded very flexibly to the unknowns of the project. “Students are willing to kind of throw it all to the wind, and take a chance on something,” she said. As soon as the interns master the equipment and understand the data input tasks, the two-person teams quickly work their way through buildings and exterior spaces.

“It's kind of a cool thing that Dallas College agreed to hire the students. ... We're all about education and bettering the students for when they graduate. Not only do we help that by creating the facilities, but now we're helping that by hiring them so they can work on a project to learn even more than they could learn in the classroom,” Wallace said.

Wallace and Sires hold periodic group meetings with the interns to discuss the floor-plan mapping project’s progress, problems, and ideas for improvements. In separate interviews Wallace and Wright talked about the GIS skills of the students and expressed appreciation for the insights they have shared.  

Leon said it’s “so refreshing” to have his bosses’ support and their acknowledgement of the GIS skills he gained during the previous two and a half years. Wallace recently had Leon present information about the floor-plan mapping project to Vice Chancellor Brad Williams.

“It has been really inspiring kind of having that feeling, that warm feeling of like, I'm being heard. They care about where we're going with this, and they care about what I think, and they care about ... some of the barriers I might run across, and they're there to kind of just help me knock them down, right. And so they've been nothing but excited about what I'm pushing forward,” he said.

Praise for Professor Sires

Leon said he is grateful to Sires for all the GIS knowledge and skills he taught him, and for telling him about the facilities department job opening and encouraging him to apply.

Leon said, Sires is “super instrumental in me even being in this spot.”

Wright also praised Sires and his GIS program for preparing the students to work effectively on this large, important project for the college. “We manage that whole [intern] process ... but the knowledge of it came from Scott’s program,” he said.

Vince DiNoto, the director of the GeoTech Center who served as the Mentor-Connect mentor to the Brookhaven team members while they were writing the ATE grant proposal, replied in an email to a query about Sires: “From when I first met Scott as a mentee, he has always been a person that I believed thought out of the box, and he still is; he gave a wonderful presentation at the GeoEd’24 conference in June.”