UNCG, N.C. A&T campuses increasing

Minnie Battle Mayes tells N.C. A&T students interested in studying abroad that if they can find her office, they are ready to travel overseas.A&T’s international programs office is in the C.H. Moore Agricultural Research Facility at the corner of Lindsay and Beech streets not a convenient location for enticing more students to take advantage of study abroad opportunities. But Mayes said the office’s pending move to the university’s new academic classroom building will raise the visibility of the international programs.I’d say the number of students that participate in a study abroad experience is about 40 a year, said Mayes, director of A&T’s international programs.A&T’s classroom building is among a host of building projects under way at the city’s two state universities. UNCG is preparing to open the School of Education building and will debut a new dorm in August. Renovations on UNCG’s Quad residence halls and its dining hall will begin at the end of the spring semester.The School of Education at UNCG and A&T’s classroom building are expected to be ready by March.

A&T’s building could be in full use by the summer. At UNCG, education faculty and staff will move in May, but the building won’t be ready for student use until the fall.A&T’s newest classroom building is adjacent to Proctor Hall, which houses its School of Education. It will be home to the international, honors and university studies programs.The 81,000-square-foot, $25 million building will give those programs more space as well as visibility, said Andrew Perkins, A&T’s assistant vice chancellor for facilities and engineering. He said the building includes 15 classrooms that seat 40 to 128 students and a lecture hall that seats about 240.

The building has state-of-the-art audio-visual and other equipment to help with distance learning in some classrooms, Perkins said.Mayes hopes to use her second-floor digs to boost the numbers of students participating in all the university’s international programs. In addition to semester study abroad experiences, the university offers short-term academic enrichment trips, which about 60 to 70 students take advantage of annually, Mayes said.But in the current location, she said it’s hard for students who have an hour’s break to leave campus, visit her office and make it back in time for their next class or activity.We’re really off the campus footprint,she said.

At UNCG, an enrollment spurt has created problems for faculty and staff in Curry, the building the School of Education now calls home.The School of Education currently is really confined, and they’re spread out in, I believe, two or three buildings on campus,said Fred Patrick, UNCG’s director of facilities, design and construction.The $47.5 million, 110,500-square-foot building is under construction at Spring Garden and Stirling streets next to the Bryan School of Business and Economics. It includes 19 general-use classrooms seating 30 to 70 students; two lecture halls; sign language and computer labs; and a student advising center.The building also includes what the university is calling collaboration spaces.These are neither classrooms nor offices, Patrick said, but informal spaces where students, faculty and staff can meet.Patrick said the building not only has more classrooms, but larger ones a must as the university confronts the probability of fewer class sections and larger class sizes in the face of budget cuts.Both the A&T and UNCG buildings incorporate sustainability in their designs. Patrick said UNCG’s School of Education building will be LEED Silver, the first LEED-certified building on the campus. Its green features include a bio-retention system; automatic daylight control inside classrooms; showers and locker rooms; and space in the basement for cyclists to store their bikes.

It’s a holistic way of looking at buildings and everything that people use in their workplace environment,Patrick said.While the Curry Building will soon be vacated, it won’t remain empty long. This summer, the university will begin a $1.8 million renovation to the building for the use of other faculty and staff. That project will take about nine months, Patrick said.