The lines for everything at Darton State College were long Wednesday. It's typical for the beginning of the semester.
Tracy Goode is the Dean of Instructional Development for the college. He said, "everyone's trying to figure out where their class is, where this class is. And there's an air of excitement."
Darton has become a popular college choice for students around South Georgia, and one of its most popular programs is nursing.
Tracy Suber is the Assistant Dean of the Nursing Program. She said, "we produce the largest number of graduates in the state of Georgia for nurses at the associates level."
Now nursing is the first 4-year degree offered at Darton. Many students in that program are already familiar with the school.
Suber said, "of the 24 students that we have in this first class, 22 are actually Darton grads."
Cody Palmer is one of those students.
"The next step for me is nurse practitioner school. I've actually scheduled my GRE already. I take it this September," he said.
One of his classmates in the nursing program is Melanie Nelms. She's in management At Flint River Hospital in Montezuma, but she wanted to be able to help her nurses.
"A lot of my nurses are LPN's and they're going back to get their RN's. I can be there to be useful to them and show them it's OK to further your education," she said.
Students such as the ones in the nursing classrooms are going to be joined by many others soon if Darton officials have their way.
In the next few years, having four year programs like nursing will help to bring more students to campus.
Tracy Goode said, "offering a four year degree program allows us to offer more at the table, so to speak, for students who want to come from North Georgia, the extreme parts of Georgia or other neighboring states."
So the construction will have to continue for some time to come.
Darton officials are waiting for the official enrollment numbers to be sure but they expect the number of students to be close to recent record numbers despite projections of enrollment declines at many schools in the university system.
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