By Thomas A. Parmalee

The Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science recently dedicated a $4.5 million Educational Cremation Center that will teach mortuary college students to become the cremation experts of tomorrow.

The center is at the core of the college’s Transforming Deathcare Education initiative, which aims  to provide students and practitioners with hands-on opportunities to participate in advanced cremation operations.

FT North America donated an FTIII, loading table and processing equipment for use at the center, which adds 8,000 square feet of education space to the college.

“If they are going to teach cremation, they might as well learn on the best equipment available! Congrats to this organization for elevating the art of cremation,” said Mike Miller, the chief operating officer of FT North America, who noted that the donation was valued at $350,000.

Jack E. Lechner Jr. (pictured at top, speaking at the dedication ceremony), who has served as president and CEO of CCMS since 2016, said that the college’s board embraced the concept of opening up such a center several years ago.  He approached FT about donating the equipment, and he was thrilled when the company indicated its willingness to support the college’s cause.

“It is the best thing that could have happened,” Lechner said. “In dealing with students, safety is a huge factor. The FTIII does not require repositioning and does not require students to stick their hands in there to do that.”

Mike Miller, chief operating officer of FT-North America, delivers remarks at the dedication.

With the national cremation rate approaching 60%, the time was right for the college to make the substantial investment necessary to provide an even better cremation education, Lechner said. Of all the mortuary colleges in the nation, CCMS is now one of the very few with a crematory on site, he said.

“We are lucky that the state of Ohio requires a bachelor’s degree (to be a funeral director) and because of that, my program takes longer than other programs,” Lechner said. “I have a year and 16 weeks. With that extra semester, we can teach about all the things funeral directors are looking for today as they try to serve the evolving needs of cremation families.”

Whether it is incorporating the use of a slumber bed, optimizing the use of a witness room or going through certified celebrant training, CCMS students are given the tools they need to succeed, Lechner said. The college has also expanded its pet loss curriculum.

The Educational Cremation Center offers much more than just a retort: It includes a reception area, witness room, refrigeration, a garage, storage for chemicals, storage for deceased pets and an alkaline hydrolysis unit for pets made by Bio-Response Solutions.

“I would say about 70% of funeral homes are involved in pet loss,” Lechner said, adding that the funeral directors of tomorrow must learn more about hospitality and incorporating event centers into funeral service.

“It’s important that our students graduate with a ServSafe Certification and an alcohol certification to reduce the risk in funeral service,” he said.

Making the center a reality was no easy task, as the college began to seek funding as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted “when you could not find a banker if your life depended on it,” Lechner said.

Like everyone else at that time, Lechner was scrambling to secure government funding to get through the pandemic, but he was also looking to get the funds to open up the Educational Cremation Center. “We got it locally from a local bank that prides itself on being local,” he said. (The bank is North Side Bank & Trust Co., he noted.)

In addition to FT North America, the college received support from a number of partners.

CCMS’s investment shows how serious it is about educating its students, Miller said. Unfortunately, some schools “are doing exactly what they were doing in 1992,” he said.  He added that as much attention should be paid in mortuary school to the art of cremation as the art of embalming – and he gave kudos to Lechner and his board of trustees for making such an investment.

“With the cremation rate being 57%, that means more than half of families select cremation,” Lechner said.  “Now, we are not saying you need to select it instead of embalming, but there is less embalming taking place. Cremation is the lion’s share of funeral service.”

He emphasized, however, that there is still ample opportunity to provide services along with a cremation. For instance, even when no embalming takes place, a funeral director can still disinfect the body and set facial features. “You can comb their hair or how about some light cosmetics?” he said. “Maybe you put on their favorite afghan or they have their favorite quilt with them.”

Providing a slumber bed and allowing a family to say a final goodbye can pay dividends for families in the throes of grief – as well as for funeral homes, Lechner said. With a slumber bed or witness room, you get the family to make a positive identification. Sometimes, someone will sit on the edge of the bed and hold their mother’s hand and say, ‘Can we wait on the cremation until tomorrow, so we can bring our grandchildren in?’ That’s a win that allows us to bring the service back into cremation – it’s not just the process.”

He also highlighted the importance of following best practices.

“The weakest place in the chain of custody is establishing the chain of custody,” he said.

As for a witness room, he said it can be comforting for a loved one to watch their loved one’s remains go into the retort. “It relieves the unknown,” he said. “There is no question that these are my loved one’s remains.”

He noted that when he was a practicing funeral director, there were only three times when he’d typically see a family overcome with emotion: when they came to the funeral home for the first time and saw their loved one; when the casket closed; and when they touched the casket or placed a flower on the casket in a cemetery and turned their back on their loved one for the last time.

“And we’ve lost that third one,” he said. “With the witness room and cremation, we get that back.”

Ernie Heffner (left) of Heffner Funeral and Cremations, York, Pennsylvania, served as the keynote speaker at the dedication. He is speaking with Michael Schoedinger of Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation, Columbus, OH
CCMS’s New Center Will be a Game Changer

CCMS will begin incorporating classes that leverage the center into the curriculum this semester, Lechner said.

Faculty members are getting trained on how to use the FTII machine, and they’ll soon be instructing students, he said.

The FTII machine won’t be reserved only for students: The International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association will conduct advanced crematory operator training using the equipment and facility, Lechner said. It will be a weeklong course.

“So, this is not only for our students coming into the profession but for the advanced crematory operator going through training who is already in the profession,” Lechner said.

Since CCMS is also licensed as a crematory, it can carry out cremations for funeral homes that were previously using third parties, Lechner said.

“So, they can come in and use the crematory, the witness room and the slumber bed, and we can charge them for all three and they can charge the family,” Lechner explained.

Already, Lechner has heard from a few funeral home owners who have told him they want CCMS to carry out their cremations. “We will work out the details with them,” he said. “We will make sure our pricing is where the market pricing is, so we are not undercutting or overselling.”

Right from the start, CCMS will have an established customer base since the cadavers it received from the University of Cincinnati were previously sent to a third-party crematory after students finished working with them. Now, CCMS can cremate the cadavers – and the University of Cincinnati won’t have to turn to someone else to carry out the cremation.

“The University of Cincinnati is excited to cut one line out of the chain of custody,” Lechner said. “And that means when I start using that crematory, I will have 500 customers. I am not starting from scratch.”

The beauty of adding another crematory to the market is that it should not harm any business since cremation continues to rise a percentage point or two every year, Lechner said. “Anyone I have talked to is prognosticating that around 80% is where it will plateau,” he said.

FT staff will be able to use the CCMS machine for two weeks out of every year, Miller said. The company will use that time to train new customers and operators on the use of the equipment, he said.

Patrick DeMeyer, Facultative Technologies, speaks with Ernie Kassoff from FT-USA and Mike Schoedinger (with his back to the camera).

While Miller wasn’t part of the initial discussions that resulted in FT donating the equipment to CCMS, he said he was “all in on it” when he first heard about it. “It is so groundbreaking that someone is actually going to put a crematory into a mortuary college and teach kids about cremation,” he said. “We absolutely wanted to be part of it. Jack gets the benefits of our customers coming to his site, and we get the benefit of having students learn on the best equipment possible. As they mature and become owners and managers themselves, they will remember the equipment they learned on.”

Lechner praised the quality of the FT equipment, noting that unlike some other units, it controls not just the heat but the oxygen as well. “Those two things together make it an incredibly safe machine, especially when talking about the cremation of larger people,” he said.

With the opening of its Educational Cremation Center, CCMS is setting the standard for cremation education, Lechner said. “I think we are the only one with an Educational Cremation Center dedication to cremation, alkaline hydrolysis and certified celebrant training,” he said.

Placing more emphasis on serving cremation families is where the entire profession needs to go, Lechner said.

“Today, if I said to family, ‘Did Dad belong to a church?’ they are liable to tell me that he belonged to the church of beer drinking and bass fishing. A funeral director needs to think fast enough to say, ‘Have you thought about a service at the marina?’ You can’t just plug in and play with a priest or rabbi.”

With students already hailing from 18 states, Lechner is hopeful the Educational Cremation Center will lead to an even higher enrollment at the college. “We don’t say we are the best because we are the oldest,” he said. “We like to say we are the oldest because we are the best … and we keep evolving.”

Guests taking their seats for the ribbon cutting ceremony at CCMS.

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