The past year has thrown up plenty of obstacles for Wagener-Salley High School teachers Alex Derrick and Ethan Busbee, along with their dozens of students in the school’s FFA chapter, but the agriculture-minded teenagers are still on board, looking to fine-tune their skills for the road ahead.
Senior Brenna Nunn, the chapter’s president, noted that FFA Week recently happened, and joined some of her neighbors in describing the program and its priorities.
Nunn did not get on board with the organization at her first opportunity.
“I want to be an engineer, and honestly, when I started high school, I was like, ‘Nope, FFA is not for me.’ So I actually didn’t do it my freshman year, and then I really saw my friends having a lot of fun with it, getting a lot of experience, so I decided to join,” she recalled.
She estimated that “not quite half the school” is involved in agriculture classes. “It’s a pretty involved chapter.”
The school’s current faculty arrangement has Derrick handling most of the mechanics-based curricula, with students learning to handle equipment properly in approaching such tasks as welding and soldering.
Busbee focuses more on flora and fauna, including a variety of local critters that were recorded in a recent project with hidden cameras located in forested areas around the school’s perimeter, recording such neighbors as deer, squirrels, coyotes, an opossum and an abundance of cats and raccoons.
The whole package has a strong family connection for junior Lance Brown, the FFA chapter’s vice president. He noted that his family has been involved in FFA dating back to his paternal grandfather.
“We actually live on a family farm, and I feel like that’s still a great class to have for working there,” he said, adding that his family’s operation, over the years, has focused on such areas as chickens, cotton, peanuts, wheat, corn, soybeans, cattle and hay.
The chapter’s other officers for this academic year are Caleb Neely, junior adviser; Olivia Anderson, secretary; Caitlin Courtney, reporter; Preston McNair, treasurer; Nathan Chandler, chaplain; and Raney Burnett, sentinel.
Read the full Aiken Standard article here.