My El Tejon Middle School FFA Adventure
Journal Entry 32, Mon 11/7/2022,
Last summer during one of my weekly volunteer days at Alpacas at Windy Hill, I met the Corey, the principal & a few of the teachers from El Tejon Middle School, located in Lebec, CA, population of around 1,400 people. Corey had toured Cindy's ranch during the 2021 Ventura County Farm Day tours. At that time, she purchased two alpacas from Cindy for the school's Future Farmers of America (FFA) program started during the 2020-2021 Covid shutdown.
Now, back to summer of 2022. Corey & her teachers were at Cindy's ranch to learn what to do with the fiber from their newly shorn alpacas. (See Alpacas at Windy Hill Welcomes FFA & New Baby Girls.) She explained the school had a population of 200 students, most of whom were from families working in the agricultural trades. The more questions I asked questions about the schools' demographics & FFA program, the more intrigued I was to visit & tour what Corey & her staff had implemented.
Corey recognized her students in this rural area had limited access to professional development exposure & resources. As such, she & her staff have developed & implemented a robust El Tejon STEAM curriculum of which the FFA program is a part. Currently, the school's FFA program can only accept about 25 students into the program each year. I asked how many kids actually applied to the program & she replied that nearly 200 did (i.e., the entire student body!). Talk about demand!!
In the first year - to the amazement of the teachers - the kids built nearly 20 3'x5' raised garden beds, planted & tended to a variety of fruits & vegetables, built the fences, chicken coops & variety of other animal shelters. Other than the two alpacas, I’m not sure where the other animals came from.
The kids regularly clean the animals' enclosures & added manure from the animals' pens to the compost pile, which is used to supplement the garden’s soil. The fruits, vegetables, eggs are harvested & cooked in the Home Economics classes. A professional butcher demonstrated & taught how to harvest some of the animals (e.g., turkey, chickens, etc.), which were also prepared & cooked in the Home Economics class. Soil-to-table hands-on experience!
So, in early November, with Corey's permission, I & a friend drove to El Tejon Middle School to meet & talk with some of the FFA kids, tour the campus to see first-hand what they built, meet all the animals they cared for, & better understand this program's influence on the kids, the staff, & community at large. Corey had notified the kids we were coming & they were prepared: They wore their official FFA jackets complete with their name embroidered on the front & large FFA patch sewn on the back.
After they escorted us to the garden & animal yard, each explained his/her role & responsibilities, introduced us to some of the animals, & led us around the different parts of the campus & buildings involved in the STEAM programs & FFA program in particular.
Although the FFA org has five main tracks, El Tejon Middle School has implemented three parts of FFA:
Animal Systems: Rabbits, chickens, ducks, turkeys, a pea hen & peacock, cats, & even Alpacas!
Entrepreneurship: Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) to develop skills in agricultural industry
Leadership: Who attend college campus tours, FFA leadership conferences, & FFA state conventions.
The FFA class democratically elects someone from the program for each position. Each position has defined roles & responsibilities which give hands-on experience in effective leadership & participation in building & maintaining their community & and organization. The FFA kids design & run annual events, from the deciding the theme to doing the logistics & promoting fund-raising. In all aspects they also budget & track the money of their many projects. Their creed is "Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Loving to Serve". The leaders I met were:
Chris, President
Jacob, Vice President
Eli, Secretary
Joseph, Treasurer
Brissa, Reporter
Abraham, Historian
Yahir, Sentinel
Though I didn’t capture them all, these are some of the pins worn on a leader’s jacket front denoting that person’s leadership role.
A few of their FFA fundraisers so far have included Animal Harvesting (Eli), Wine Cup holders made out of recycled rakes (Yahir), wood chopping/sales (Chris), & welded boot racks (Brissa).
Our last stop was the welding shop, the newest addition to the program. In the welding shop, I asked one of the students which skill did he want to excel at? He replied, "I want to be excellent at all of them so I will always be employed." Looks like lessons from this FFA program will last a lifetime for some if not all of these kids.
To think I never would have known about the El Tejon Middle School FFA & STEAM program had it not been for those two alpacas Corey purchased from Cindy in the fall of 2021. This was an unexpected & surprising conclusion of my first year of Alpaca Adventures! It left me curious about what forward-thinking, outdoor-focused programs are available to urban kids in the Los Angeles area. I'm starting to feel year-two adventures pulling me in the overall Fibershed direction. Don't worry, alpacas will continue to be a part of the story!
Epilog
Before doing this article I honestly didn’t know FFA still existed. One of the things I discovered was how rare an FFA program is in a Jr. High/Middle School is in California. To understand how rare this is, out of roughly 1,300 middle schools in California, El Tejon is one of only eight with an FFA program. That's less than 1% (.62%) of the middle schools who have an FFA program!! And of the 890K middle school kids in CA, El Tejon can accept only around 25 students into the program, making the lucky ones in El Tejon Middle School FFA program a mere .003% of the middle school kids participating in FFA in all of California. Wow!