Amy Alexander Carter grew up in Valdosta. She attended public schools and earned a Bachelor of Science in Education from Valdosta State College in 1993, the very same year the institution of higher learning was renamed Valdosta State University and charged with serving the educational needs of 41 counties across South Georgia.
“Having grown up in Valdosta, I have watched the school from which I graduated grow into a thriving institution of higher learning,” said the wife, mother of two, and veteran educator. She is the Teaching as a Profession and Work-Based Learning coordinator at Lowndes High School. “VSU plays an integral part in this community I love.”
When she was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2006, Carter made a commitment to the residents of District 175, which includes Brooks County and parts of Lowndes and Thomas counties, to seek innovative solutions to issues in both her own back yard and around the state. She never forgot her alma mater, and when the time came, she helped secure state funding for VSU’s $36 million, 140,000-square-foot Health Sciences and Business Administration Building, which is located at the intersection of Patterson Street and Pendleton Drive on the university’s Rea and Lillian Steele North Campus.
“Considering health care careers are toward the top of ‘fastest-growing jobs’ lists and most needed in rural Georgia,” said the community servant who received the Loyce W. Turner Award for Public Service from VSU in 2012, “the Health Sciences and Business Administration Building is essential to our part of the state. South Georgia and the 41 counties that VSU serves will benefit greatly from this incredible opportunity to vamp up the health care profession, and the … (Harley Langdale Jr. College of Business Administration) is in desperate need of more space. It’s the perfect combination of programs for our area, and it will make recruitment easy throughout the state, nation, and world.”
The Health Sciences and Business Administration Building represents VSU’s long-standing commitment to regional engagement. A project more than 10 years in the making, construction on the facility began in the fall of 2012 and is expected to be completed by January 2014. It will house programs in nursing, exercise physiology, communication sciences and disorders, athletic training, health care administration, social work, and dental hygiene, which is offered through an innovative partnership with Wiregrass Georgia Technical College
“I am proud to be VSU’s loudest cheerleader, both in Atlanta and in South Georgia.”