Georgia Southern’s Lactation Badge Leaves Liberty Campus Out

Georgia Southern’s Armstrong and Statesboro campuses carry six dedicated lactation rooms under a local Breastfeeding Welcome Here badge, while the Liberty Campus list is still blank. Healthy Savannah, a Savannah nonprofit, handed university officials a framed certificate on July 9, 2025, at the Health Professions Academic Building on the Armstrong Campus in Savannah.

The badge is a door decal and a certificate, not a state license. It sits on rooms that faculty, staff, students, and visitors may use, if they can get in. On the university’s own page, most rooms remain locked until a named staffer is contacted. The campus next to Fort Stewart does not appear on that page at all.

A Savannah Nonprofit Issued the Welcome Badge

Healthy Savannah launched Breastfeeding Welcome Here earlier in 2025. Groups that offer reasonable break time and a private, clean space, other than a restroom, get a decal for the door and a certificate meant for a break room or a lobby. Armand Turner, the nonprofit’s executive director, presented the university’s certificate at a short ceremony on Armstrong. Dr. Stuart Tedders, dean of the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, and Dr. Stephen Rossi, then interim dean of the Waters College of Health Professions, accepted it.

Georgia Southern University has set a commendable example by offering three lactation rooms at the Armstrong campus here in Savannah as well as three at the Statesboro campus.

Armand Turner, executive director, Healthy Savannah, at the July 9, 2025 certificate of recognition ceremony

Turner used the same event to invite other Savannah-area schools and businesses to ask Healthy Savannah for help building similar rooms. The program is tied to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health grant. In 2023 the CDC awarded a second five-year, $5.1 million REACH grant to Healthy Savannah and the YMCA of Coastal Georgia, with breastfeeding named among the aims, after a first round that began in 2018.

Dr. Nandi Marshall, associate dean for academic affairs in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health and a certified lactation counselor, told the room that Georgia Southern was an original REACH collaborator. Marshall has spent years pushing Savannah employers and public campuses to meet Georgia’s pumping statute and to treat lactating students as people with a right to stay in class.

Six Dedicated Rooms, and Most Stay Locked

Amber Johns Culpepper, Georgia Southern’s Title IX coordinator, said at the recognition that numerous students per year use the university’s six dedicated rooms, and that the school will try to find extra space for a visitor who cannot use the posted list. The Equal Opportunity and Title IX office’s published list of lactation rooms is the working map. It says each listed room is private and has a chair, a table, electrical outlets, and a sink in the room or close by. Users bring their own pumps, parts, and nursing pillows.

It also says, in plain language, that most rooms remain locked and require contacting a designated person. That rule is the daily test the decal does not mention. A pumping parent on a 15-minute gap between classes cannot wait on an unanswered email.

THE SIX DEDICATED ROOMS

Only Room 147 in the Health Professions Academic Building is described as open for walk-up use. Hendricks Hall 3002, inside the College of Public Health and labeled Reading Room, has a small refrigerator, a privacy screen, and a chair, and the same page still warns that it may be locked. Statesboro’s Russell Union is listed separately as an overflow option: ask the service desk for a room, which is not the same as a dedicated, posted space.

A May 2026 Healthy Savannah roster of participating organizations still named three Armstrong locations and three at Statesboro. The university’s 2026 Title IX page still does not add Liberty.

Liberty Campus Still Has No Listed Room

Georgia Southern’s third campus is the Liberty Campus in Hinesville, a few minutes from Fort Stewart, with additional military ties to Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. The university markets it as the place where active-duty students, veterans, and their families get a small-campus schedule and fee waivers for active-duty troops.

LIBERTY AT A GLANCE

• Fall 2024 headcount: Georgia Southern’s official snapshot put Liberty at 444 students, against 4,970 at Armstrong and 18,258 at Statesboro, with 27,506 students in the whole system that term.
• The next fall: Campus director Dr. Chante Baker Martin said enrollment had grown to 486.
• Who is enrolled: Martin said more than 50% of Liberty students are military affiliated, and more than 70% live in Liberty and Long counties.

That is the campus most likely to hold young parents on a work-and-class clock, and it is the campus with no building, room number, or staff contact on the lactation list. Armstrong and Liberty even share a Title IX walk-in note pointing to the Office of Legal Affairs in Victor Hall on Armstrong, which is no help to someone already in Hinesville with a pump bag and a class in 20 minutes.

Georgia’s public-employee statute requires a private room in close proximity to the employee’s work area. A Liberty staffer who pumps is an employee at a worksite that the university’s public list does not cover. Culpepper’s pledge to find space beyond the posted rooms is the only written fallback, and it still depends on reaching an office in time.

What Georgia’s Charlotte’s Law Already Required

The badge tracks laws the university already had to meet for workers. Georgia’s 2020 rewrite of its lactation-break statute, often called Charlotte’s Law, took effect on August 5, 2020. Private employers sit in O.C.G.A. 34-1-6. State agencies, including public universities, sit in a parallel section that orders paid break time for public employees who need to express milk at the worksite, plus a private location other than a restroom close to the work area. Georgia sets no one-year cutoff. Breaks are paid at the regular rate, and a salaried worker cannot be forced to burn leave or take a pay cut for the time.

Federal law is thinner on pay and shorter on time. The PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, enforced through the Fair Labor Standards Act, requires reasonable break time and a space that is not a bathroom, shielded from view and free from intrusion, for one year after a child’s birth. The U.S. Department of Labor’s federal pump-at-work rules say an employer may use a temporary room if it is available when the worker needs it, and may not send anyone to a restroom. State rules that pay the time or last past one year still govern. Georgia is one of those states.

WHAT THE BADGE ADDS, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

• For employees: Paid reasonable breaks and a private non-restroom space were already required of Georgia public agencies in 2020, with no one-year cap.
• For students: Title IX still bars pregnancy discrimination. A 2024 federal rewrite that spelled out student lactation rooms was later stripped from the books, so the cleaner student path on this campus is the Title IX office’s own room list and request form.
• For guests: The posted rooms are open to campus visitors on paper. Getting through a locked door still means finding the right staffer.
• For the badge itself: Healthy Savannah’s decal marks groups that already offer the time and the space. It does not inspect lock policies, hours, or a third campus.

Private firms with fewer than 50 workers can claim undue hardship under the Georgia private statute. Georgia Southern is not that employer. The federal PUMP Act has a similar small-firm hardship path. Neither path explains a blank Hinesville line on a three-campus map.

Black Mothers in Chatham County Asked for Space

The Armstrong certificate is easier to read as a public-health deliverable than as a sudden burst of campus hospitality. Marshall and Christina S. Cook published a photovoice study in Health Promotion Practice in 2023, “Trust Black Women: Using Photovoice to Amplify the Voices of Black Women to Identify and Address Barriers to Breastfeeding in Southeast Georgia.” Black mothers in Chatham County took cameras to the social, cultural, and physical barriers they hit while trying to feed infants. Lack of physical spaces, thin peer and family support, and stigma came up again and again. So did a direct ask for more lactation rooms.

That project produced a policy toolkit, a sample workplace policy, a push for Savannah to call itself a Breastfeeding Family Friendly Community, and an online photobook. It is the same through-line as REACH, which is built to cut racial gaps in chronic disease by changing the places people work, shop, and study. Marshall joined the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee’s CRASH committee in 2018, a group formed to push equity inside breastfeeding policy. When she talks about campus rooms, she is not borrowing a student-affairs talking point. She has been documenting missing rooms in this county for years.

Healthy Savannah’s later public-service spots kept Georgia Southern on a list with the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, Enmarket Arena, Oglethorpe Mall, and the Savannah Children’s Museum. The university is one node in a county-wide map, which is why a locked Student Union room and an unlisted Liberty Campus matter outside the registrar’s office. A decal in Savannah does not pump for a parent in Hinesville.

Students and Staff Share the Same Door

Marshall put the practical conflict in one line when the rooms were shown to cameras in July 2025.

You don’t want someone to have to choose between going to work and pumping or going to class and pumping.

Dr. Nandi Marshall, associate dean, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health

Workers and students are using the same six doors, under different statutes, on two campuses. Employees can point to paid time and a nearby room. Students point to a Title IX coordinator, a pregnancy accommodation form, and a list that still tells them to email someone who may be in a meeting. Visitors are allowed, then stopped by a lock. The open room in the Health Professions Academic Building is the exception that shows the rest of the map is a permission system.

A locked-room rule can live on a public university page when the civic story stops at the certificate. There was little public argument about access after July 2025, and no later Healthy Savannah roster filled in Liberty. The people who need the door between a lab and a lecture are not a press-conference category. They are the reason the photovoice mothers asked for rooms in the first place.

FROM THE STATUTE TO THE DECAL

1. December 2018: Marshall is appointed to the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee’s CRASH committee.
2. August 5, 2020: Georgia’s paid lactation-break law takes effect for private employers and, in a parallel section, for public agencies.
3. 2023: Marshall and Cook publish the Chatham County photovoice study, and the CDC funds a second five-year, $5.1 million REACH grant that names breastfeeding as a focus.
4. July 9, 2025: Turner presents the Breastfeeding Welcome Here certificate at Armstrong’s Health Professions Academic Building, citing three rooms there and three in Statesboro.
5. May 2026: Healthy Savannah’s participating-organization list still names three Armstrong locations and three at Statesboro, with Liberty still off the page.

Georgia Southern’s own about-block at the recognition called the university a public Carnegie doctoral R2 campus, founded in 1906, with about 155 degree programs and more than 27,506 students across Statesboro, Savannah, Hinesville, and online. That Hinesville line is doing less work than the certificate implies. The six rooms are real, they are used, and the open door in Room 147 is a fair model. Until Liberty has a room number a parent can walk to, the welcome on the decal stops at two campuses.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on campus facilities and a public-health recognition program. It is informational only and is not legal advice, medical advice, or an official statement of Georgia Southern University policy. It does not tell any employee, student, or visitor what accommodation they are owed in a specific case, and it is not a substitute for advice from a qualified employment lawyer, a Title IX officer, or a licensed clinician who provides lactation care. Room locations, lock rules, and the statutes described here can change, so anyone who needs a space or a break should confirm the current list and the current law before relying on them.