The opening of the Beaumont medical school at Oakland University has been postponed for one year.

The inaugural class of 50 students was planned to start in fall 2010, but this August OU announced that the class is now planned to start in fall 2011.

In a recent interview, Robert Folberg, the founding dean of the upcoming OU William Beaumont School of Medicine, said this was done to benefit medical school students and the medical school.

“We could’ve cut corners to meet an arbitrary goal,” Folberg said. “Or we could’ve followed president [Gary] Russi’s goals and my goals.”

Plans for the school, a private allopathic medical school in collaboration with OU and Beaumont Hospitals, were announced in August 2008.

Although some medical school classes and offices are on OU’s campus, officials said the school is to be a funded not through state/taxpayer money or from tuition of the regular students at OU administration, but through private donations, medical school student tuition and the school’s intellectual property, such as research.

The medical school is currently in its second step of being fully accredited, because this August was filed a 850-page accreditation application to the Liaison Council for Medical Education, the organization whose accreditation is needed to teach students and grant degrees.

This application includes information such as the budget, funds, faculty hired and a detailed curriculum description.

“There are about 800 instructional hours … every hour is mapped out,” Folberg said. “The reason is because the patient is at the other end of it.”

If LCME feels the application qualifies, its representatives will make a site visit, which will be on OU and Beaumont locations. If the visit goes well, LCME will give the school preliminary accreditation, which will allow it to recruit and accept applicants and enroll the inaugural class.

The school originally planned to file the application earlier and have preliminary accreditation status by this summer, but later “decided to file the application when we were ready,” Folberg said.

He didn’t like the term “delay because it makes it seem like something went wrong … Nothing is wrong.”

He said at the current rate, the med school could start accepting student applications in October 2010, but it would get fewer applicants if it did so because students usually start applying in May. So they’d rather wait until next season and get a full batch of applicants.

OU officials said they expect this school will create hundreds of jobs, bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the region and help with the predicted upcoming doctor shortage.

OU’s faculty union and The Oakland Post filed separate Freedom Of Information Act requests to OU for the application the medical school filed in August. The FOIA requests were denied last week because the requested documents were “exempted from disclosure” because they contain private individual information, trade secrets and financial information and other data used to administer a license, public employment and academic examination, said Jayson Hall, OU’s FOIA coordinator.

The union said it wanted the information because it suspects the school may be partially funded by public money. But OU officials have denied this claim.

Kay Nguyen, campus editor of The Post, said it was a “point of interest” to see if the union’s accusations are right.

Lizabeth Barclay, the union’s grievance officer, said it’s considering whether to appeal to OU President Gary Russi or to seek judicial review, which were the two options given in the denial letter.

Folberg said applications are usually not released while LCME review is going on, but some medical schools release it a couple years after they get accredited.