AUGUSTA, Ga. (WFXG) - As Augusta Technical College continues to celebrate Founders' Week, marking the schools 60th anniversary, we took a close look at what the new man at the helm has done in his short time at the school and his big plans for the immediate future.

Since taking over as President of Augusta Technical College late last year Dr. Jermaine Whirl got right to work in making the schools 60th anniversary year special. Most recently Augusta Tech and Augusta University announced a partnership at the Georgia Cyber Center where both schools hold classes. Augusta Tech students there can now move seamlessly right into AU's bachelor degree program.

"That's significant for a couple of reasons. Number one, we want to retain talent in the market, we don't want folks to have to go off to Atlanta or other areas to get a bachelor's degree, we have that here. And number two given that we have the military and we already have private industries in the other building, Shaffer building, we want to be able to get them employability and opportunities right here,” said Dr. Whirl.

And Dr. Whirl and his staff aren’t stopping there. They have several initiatives and other partnerships in the pipeline, including establishing a medical campus in Augusta's downtown medical district. Dr. Whirl says he can't at this point reveal the specifics with the details and the official announcement coming in the next few weeks.

"Augusta Tech for those who don't know, our health care programs actually were in downtown in the early 80's before we brought them here to south Augusta. so we're going back to the future in moving back downtown in a great space that will really expand or learning opportunities for our health care students."

On the subject of school facilities, while the current main campus is more than adequate and functional, under Dr. Whirl's leadership big changes are coming in the form of a brand new state of the art campus.

"It's gonna stay here in south Augusta, we're not gonna move, but we really want to have new infrastructure, new buildings that really speak to 21st century learning," said Whirl.  "We have wonderful support systems from our commissioners, our delegation. we think that's a realistic project and we're starting the work on some renderings now to help us start to think about what does education look like in the next sixty years."

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