The first official architectural renderings of West Georgia Technical College’s new Carroll Campus show two large buildings planned for the Buffalo Creek Technology Park on the Carrollton Bypass.
“This campus will certainly bring Carroll County what it deserves in terms of space, technology and resources,” WGTC President Dr. Scott Rule said. “We are prioritizing classrooms, labs and student spaces to make sure they can be the very best they can be. It is a campus we can all be proud of.”
The main classroom building, a three-story brick and steel structure, will house the enrollment center including offices for admissions and financial aid personnel, along with labs for paramedicine and certified nursing assistant programs on the first floor.
The student center, bookstore and library will occupy a large portion of the second floor, with classrooms, computer labs and faculty offices filling the rest.
The top floor will include a large cosmetology salon and labs for chemistry, criminal justice, engineering and early childhood development. General classrooms will be scattered on all floors.
The second building is a large, single-story technical education building of almost 62,000 square feet. Inside, the space is divided into quadrants housing labs for industrial programs. The diesel equipment lab occupies one quadrant; the welding lab occupies another, with classroom space for the commercial truck driving program. The third quadrant will support construction programs: carpentry, plumbing and air conditioning. The fourth quadrant will house the precision manufacturing, industrial systems and machine tool programs.
Rule said the technical building will be a highlight, as existing programs – which may be space-constrained now – will have the square-footage, equipment and ceiling heights they need to optimize instruction.
“Our faculty and staff are doing a terrific job using a 50-year-old facility that we have remodeled and massaged and lived in,” Rule said. “They have been asking for more because they can imagine all the enhancements and extras and benefits they can provide our students when they have the right space, configured the right way to really do what they want to do.”
Including a smaller third building to house maintenance, total square footage for the campus buildings is 146,697 square feet.
As for the site layout, the first building will be prominent to technology park visitors, facing a large roundabout already present on site. A two-story glass façade will welcome guests to the gray brick facility.
The second building will sit behind and slightly lower than the first with greenspace space between. Large parking areas surround both buildings, with 693 spots proposed. A new driver training range will be constructed to support the commercial truck driving program.
The campus will be constructed on about 40 acres of the Technology Park donated by the Carroll County Development Authority. The campus site will fill the left side of the Technology Park, if facing it from the Highway 166 Bypass. The Carroll County Development Authority retains the right side of the Park and continues to market it for possible development.
Buffalo Creek marks the extreme left of the Park, behind the campus site. A portion of the Park there is in a floodplain and preserved as wetlands.
The new campus is scheduled to open in 2022 and replace the College’s 52-year-old campus on Newnan Road. Programs currently offered at the Newnan Road campus will relocate when the new campus opens.
West Georgia Technical College, with campuses in Carroll, Coweta, Douglas, Haralson and Troup counties and class sites in Heard and Meriwether counties, offers more than 120 associate degree, diploma and technical certificate programs of study. A unit of the Technical College System of Georgia, West Georgia Tech is one of the largest of the state’s 22 technical colleges. For more information, please visit www.westgatech.edu.
