We live in rural communities. Many of our students in these communities are used to seeing corn fields, soybean fields and other options.

We have many community supported agriculture (CSA) farms in our communities, or massive farms that have their wares for sale during the farming season at locations like Kroul Farms in rural Mount Vernon or the farmers market held at Morning Glory Farms.

We have community gardens that many citizens contribute time and energy to each year, producing local produce for Southeast Linn Community Center.

And while the number of youth who grow up on farms has reduced due to consolidation of farms, we still have active 4-H Programs in our community who share projects in both agriculture and other areas at county fairs every year.

As Mount Vernon Schools realized like Lisbon before them, it seems odd that the district wasn’t offering ag and natural resources classes. As a career and technical education aligned area, it makes sense for the classes to be offered locally. As Keegan pointed out in an interview following the school board meeting, there are many districts offering these classes now, several of them neighboring and sometimes competing with Mount Vernon.

And Mount Vernon found as the community finds many times when they ask for support for something they believe should be offered- people came through for the development of a program over the next several years with more than $180,000 in donations to the Mount Vernon Community School Foundation to help support the start of the program.

Like Lisbon when they started their own ag and natural resources classes a few years ago, Mount Vernon will start small with a few classes and grow by the number of students interested what the program looks like in the future, up to starting a potential Future Farmers of America program like Lisbon has done with Springville.

Starting any new program, especially in times of tight budgets for schools, is never easy, but offering students more opportunities to explore at the high school level what they want to do in their future is something that is beneficial, period. Especially when there are so many careers in agriculture in our state students would have more exposure to.