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Feature Stories
Community and Alumni Partnerships Help Your Program Reach New Heights
Alumni Partnerships: The Backbone of Great Agricultural Education Programs
Alumni Affiliates Relieve Teachers, Assist Students
New Year’s Resolution: Start or Grow Your FFA Alumni Affiliate
Community and Alumni Partnerships Help Your Program Reach New Heights
You’re a good teacher. You know it. Your students and their parents like and respect you, and your administration, for the most part, allows you the freedom to run your classroom. Your days are filled with lesson plans, labs, helping with SAEs and working with CDE teams, and you still somehow manage to spend time with your family. These days are long and full, but you can handle it and still do a good job.
But you’re also EXHAUSTED.
Sound familiar? If you’re like many, the very reason you joined this profession in the first place is the very thing that often drains you. But you like knowing that the work you do—no matter how hard it is or how late into the night it takes—helps shape the future of your students. And we applaud you for that. Without you, the future of agriculture would be bleak.
But what if we told you we could help you with your workload and take your program to the next level? No, we can’t clone you, but there is the next best thing: community and alumni partnerships. They can help lighten your load, so you can concentrate on the things that matter most. This issue of Making a Difference shows you what partnerships can do for you and what you can do to get one started today. Sure, you can do it alone and do a good job. But when you’ve got willing participants to help you, why not let them?
The National Quality Program Standards for Secondary Agriculture Education call for school and community partners to engage in developing and supporting quality agriculture education. So, how do volunteers and community partners come together in an organized way in support of achieving the dynamic goals of agriculture education? Read Alumni Partnerships: The Backbone of Great Agricultural Education Programs to learn more.
Be honest. Have you ever looked at those National Quality Program Standards and thought to yourself, “How on earth could I ever get all that done?” It’s a fairly common reaction. But luckily for you, an alumni affiliate is just a phone call away. Check out Alumni Affiliates Relieve Teachers, Assist Students to discover how you can make your local affiliate work for you.
Starting an alumni affiliate group isn’t as tough as it sounds. And luckily for you, FFA is here to help. Read New Year’s Resolution: Start or Grow Your FFA Alumni Affiliate and make it your resolution for 2009 to get your alumni partnership flourishing.
In his article, Growing with Your Alumni Affiliate, National FFA Alumni Association President Sam Atherton gives his perspective on why utilizing community partnerships and alumni organizations is essential in taking your program to the next level.
Making a Difference is giving you a belated Christmas present for this month’s LK Spotlight—a FREE LifeKnowledge lesson plan on developing partners for your FFA chapter. This lesson includes an interest approach, solid objectives, e-Moments, assessments, extended application activities, activity sheets and much more to help strengthen your FFA program by stressing the value of partnerships.
In this month’s Question for the Profession, LPS specialist Nina Crutchfield reveals her findings in the search for that ever-elusive “silver bullet” you’ve sought to maximize student success and still maintain a work-life balance. Alumni partnerships worked for her—what is your “silver bullet?”
It’s never too late to start partnering with community and alumni affiliates to get the most out of your agriculture program. We hope this issue can help you jump start your local affiliate and help relieve some of the responsibilities that keep you from taking your program to the next level.
Amber Striegel
Editor
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