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May 13th, 2015
With all of the noise we heard about charter schools earlier this year, it sometimes seemed as if some folks had completely forgotten about the quality of our public school system here in Marshall County. As a member of the Marshall County Schools Pride & Progress Committee, I have been fortunate to get an up-close look at what our schools have to offer, and I’m here to tell you that the opportunities for our students are far beyond anything you have ever imagined.
I wish I could take the time to give you an exhaustive listing of the unique course offerings at Cameron and John Marshall. I wish I had the time and space to detail the dozens and dozens of local, regional, and state-level awards earned by our students. Unfortunately, an article detailing all of that information would take weeks to write, and far too many pages to publish in this space. Instead, I will simply touch on one of the most impressive areas of study available to Marshall County students: the agriculture and natural resources classes at Cameron High School.
Last week, I had the opportunity to tour the facilities at the new Cameron High. I was accompanied by Scott Varner, the Director of Career, Technical and Adult Education in Marshall County. Our tour guides were John Lockhart and Hattie DeBolt, both of whom teach various agriculture-related courses at Cameron. Before beginning my tour, I was prepared to be impressed by what I expected to see. After all, Mr. Varner had recently made a presentation to the Pride & Progress Committee, during which he outlined the multiple awards that had been earned by “ag” students at Cameron. What I saw, however, vastly exceeded every one of my expectations.
My tour began in the meat lab. It looked more like a hospital operating room. Sparkling clean floors, stainless steel tables and equipment galore, and a general feel of “ultra-sanitary.” Mr. Lockhart explained the various items of equipment on display, all designed to help students learn about the proper techniques for processing beef, pork, chicken, lamb and other meats. As we went further into the lab, I saw a group of students who were preparing various meats for the upcoming FFA banquet. They were so focused on what they were doing that they didn’t notice our little tour group. We saw a huge walk-in freezer, a similarly sized cooler and a rail system designed to transport the meat from where it is first unloaded at the back door of the facility all the way through processing. Once I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I noted how very impressed I was with what I saw. Mr. Varner, beaming with pride, told me of a conversation he had with an expert in the field, who told him Cameron High had the best meat lab of any institution east of the Mississippi. Mr. Lockhart then related how the lab had recently been visited by officials from WVU, who were in the process of upgrading their meat lab. They wanted to pattern what they were doing after what had already been done at Cameron. Think about THAT for a second. The largest institution of higher learning in the State of West Virginia came to Cameron High School to learn how to build a top-quality meat lab. Wow. I mean, really. Wow!!
After finishing our tour of the meat lab, Mr. Lockhart and Ms. DeBolt took me into a classroom to tell me something about the FFA program at the school. When most folks think about FFA activities, they think about raising and selling farm animals. They think rural, simple and unsophisticated. They could not possibly be more wrong. Modern farming is a business, and the students at Cameron are being prepped to go into business. They maintain very detailed logs about their particular projects. They maintain notebooks that include a journal of their daily activities, itemized income and expense reports, a detailed business plan and profit/loss statements for each project. I looked through several of the notebooks on hand, and Ph.D. level education or not, I would be hard-pressed to duplicate what I saw.
I would be remiss if I wrote this article without saying a few things about the educators who make it possible. Mr. Lockhart and Ms. DeBolt are both young folks whose passion for and dedication to what they are doing is as obvious as it is infectious. They are committed to doing the best they can to prepare their students to excel in an agricultural business world that is vastly different than it was 25 years ago. We have probably all had the experience of that atypical teacher who was simply “going through the motions.” We can also remember teachers whose dedication and effort was a positive influence in our lives. After spending an hour or two with Mr. Lockhart and Ms. DeBolt, I can say with absolute confidence that they are a tremendous positive influence for the kids at Cameron.
So, do you think we have an average school system here in Marshall County? You might want to consider that students from Cameron recently were awarded 25 State Degrees by the West Virginia FFA. Despite a membership of over 5,000 students, prior to this year the highest number of State Degrees ever awarded to a single school--EVER--was 23. That record was set 15 years ago by Ripley High School, a much larger school with a much higher enrollment than Cameron. Or perhaps you think that agriculture courses are for students who can’t excel in more traditional areas of study. If so, you might want to consider that eight of the students who will graduate in the academic “Top Ten” at Cameron High in 2015 were involved in the Agriculture and Natural Resources program.
In a previous article, I talked about the top-notch evaluations received by Marshall County Schools in a state-mandated survey. In a future article, I’m going to talk about the college-level engineering instruction that is coming next year . . . or the leadership initiative that will be put into place to introduce our youngsters to the leader that lives in each and every one of them. I’m excited to be a small part of a tremendous school system. Most importantly, I am proud to see what Marshall County Schools have become: one of the best school systems in West Virginia.
