Lisbon and Springville students have been enjoying the joint FFA program between the two communities this school year.
Lisbon student Caleb Ross presented at the school board meeting his takeaways from attending the national FFA Convention his October.
“Overall, it was a lot of fun,” Ross said. “I was able to meet a lot of people and been exposed to a lot of agricultural careers I had never considered.”
On the first day of the trip, students went to a number of agriculture examples, including an orchard and a fishery. Ross said he learned a lot about the ways farmers make an orchard work. The fishery was one of his least favorite parts of the trip, but he got to see the koi ponds that raise multiple fish in that area.
The first official day of the convention, students were able to engage with the speaker as well as college representatives and companies.
“I met a lot of new people at the convention,” Ross said. “People from Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio and other parts of Iowa. That was one of my favorite parts.”
Another highlight for Ross was seeing a tour of the Fair Oaks Farm and their dairy operation.
“Just seeing how willing these cows were to be milked two to three times a day in a mostly automated fashion,” Ross said.
Board member Allan Mallie said there were more than 70,000 students in attendance for the national convention this year.
Instructor Mikayla Larsen explained how the program has worked as a joint program for Lisbon and Springville. She has previously taught at Springville for five years, and had a few students from Lisbon who have driven to Springville to take part in classes in the past. With Lisbon now hosting a classroom for Larsen at their building, interest in the program has grown.
FFA is more than just classroom education. Students also have the ability to participate in projects and competitions. Students also work with teachers to develop a supervised agricultural experience about something they want to learn about.
“Some of that can be just as easy as wanting to learn how to raise animals,” Larsen said. “But that’s also led to students learning the steps it would take them to raise chickens in the City of Springville.”
Larsen said that those programs help students develop their skills in agriculture.
One of the areas that Larsen said she measures as a success is if students in this joint program have a project that excels at a competition.
“As a shared program, we’re fighting many of the same challenges as other programs do, but we’re also fighting with how we are able to make schedules for two schools work together to allow students to collaborate on a project,” Larsen said. “When our students are able to step higher and make more accomplishments, I feel better because they fought so much to make that project work.”
Students at Springville and Lisbon are working on their feed a family drive for the Thanksgiving holiday. They are also building their plans for celebrating National FFA week in February 2025.
Larsen was asking the Lisbon School Board to consider adding an assistant advisor for the program. As the numbers for FFA continue to grow, she foresees an assistant being able to provide more supervision for trips students are on, an extra driver to help assist getting students to competitions, help with coaching contest teams and help with summer programming.
“We have 40 members between both schools enrolled in the program, and now that there’s a classroom space at Lisbon, interest and excitement have been growing,” Larsen said.
Larsen said that she makes sure students at Lisbon have the same opportunities that students at Springville have, and that having a second person for this new program will only strengthen the offerings of the program in the future.
The board took no action on hiring an additional staff person at November’s school board meeting.