My Amazing FFA Week!!

After spending Monday with Franklin Simpson and South Warren, Logan and I headed back to Bowling Green to meet up with Joenelle and the Warren Central FFA for an afternoon of workshops, food and cake!

Warren Central has a great chapter, with numerous members eagerly excited for workshops and the upcoming Barren River Regional FFA Day. I was able to meet several awesome members and have fun during some workshops!

After leaving there, Logan and I drove 3 hours back to UK, which was quite interesting, with an entertaining phone call from Alex Land.

Thursday afternoon, I headed out to Bourbon County High School for their Greenhand and Chapter Degree Ceremony. I also got to meet several really awesome members and took quite a few pictures, especially of their cool "greenhand" poster!

Friday afternoon I headed down to E-Town to John Hardin High School for their Greenhand Banquet. I had an awesome time talking to all the members, eating a "greenhand" cake, and checking out an awesome FFA Week Showcase!

I left E-Town, to head back to Spencer County, home of Kevin Herndon, where I met up with Kevin, Audie, and Jake. It was so fun getting to spend time with these guys, especially those Western KY kids I never see. We also watched a really awesome movie, Never Back Down.

Alex, Logan, Elizabeth, and Lauren all joined us for Saturday's big event, the Spencer County Invitational. It was so awesome to see so many chapters from across the state preparing for regional days. While we ran the speech prep room, we also got to eat with some awesome members. It was during lunch when Alex and I took a poll to see what the majority of members called drinks. I call every "soft drink" a coke, while she calls it "pop". My argument was that pop is a type of music, like Britney Spears! Anyways, Pop won. After the poll the state officers taught the members a dance, and played Ships and Sailors, and a huge Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament, which was awesome! Congratulations to all the winners at the Invitational!

While at the Invitational we were reunited with several Past State Officers!! Like, Derek Adams (Poppa SOC), Dustin Johnson, Samantha Clark, and Magen Roberts(Momma SOC). Sorry if I left anybody out!!

After all this fun and excitement, the State Officers headed back to Kevin's house for a nap, apples to apples, ribs, and State Convention Planning. We got alot planned for convention, and we are getting super pumped for June 7th to roll around!!

In the course of that week I drove 859 miles, it was totally work it, so thank you KY FFA!!! I had an amazing FFA Week as a KY FFA State Officer and I will never forget it!

Embrace the Challenge KY FFA!!

Gabrielle Burgess

Barren River State Vice-President

FFA WEEK!!!!

My week started off wonderfully by making a visit to Franklin Simpson High School FFA where "Momma SOC" (Magen Roberts) teaches. I visited with her Agriscience Class who were a wonderful group of sophomores. We talked about prioritizing and how we should keep focus on what we needed to work on and not the things of less importance! These students were great to work with, as they were all very passionate about so many different things! After the workshop was over I completed a Question and Answer session with the students and Ms. Roberts.

I then made a 15 minute trip down the road to have an afternoon of workshops with a newly charted chapter in Warren County, South Warren is the 5th high school in Bowling Green, and the 4th with an FFA Chapter. This is the first year for students at South Warren and they have quickly recruited 120 members! I was joined by Joenelle Futrell, and Western Kentucky Unversity Collegiate FFA for an afternoon of workshops. I believe that I can speak for Joenelle and WKU Collegiate FFA, when I say that I had an amazing time at this chapter. The students were all very active and interested in the FFA world!

Needless to say Day 1 of FFA Week was an amazing start!! I can't wait to see what the rest of this week has in store!!

Embrace the Challenge!!

Gabrielle Burgess

Barren River State Vice-President

Catch up Time!

A few of the events in my FFA life from the past few weeks... in no particular order.

1) Northern Kentucky Region FLC! It took months of meetings, facebook messages, emails, phone calls, and text messages with my regional officers, but on February 4, the NKY FLC finally came to life! With the auditorium and registration area decorated, workshop classrooms set up, and t-shirts given out, roughly 150 freshman braved the snowy weather (and their advisors driving!) and arrived ready for an awesome day of leadership! I had the opportunity to lead a workshop on leadership with Alex Land and we had a blast meeting and teaching the freshman! A HUGE shout out to the Northern Kentucky regional officers for helping make this a success!

2) Fleming County! This past weekend, I got to hang out with the executive council of Fleming County (and Elizabeth and Joenelle were there too) while they led workshops for the middle school ag students at Simons Middle School at an ALL NIGHT conference! Now, I'm someone who likes my sleep, so this was a bit of a challenge for me, as you can probably tell by the pictures taken at about 6:00 am... I look a little rough. No matter how much sleep I had to make up, this night holds some of my favorite memories of my year as a state officer so far. Chasing school ghosts, playing with one of those awesome rubber balls from Wal-Mart in the hallway, and just running around the school having fun made this one trip I won't soon forget!

3) Frankfort! Three days this month I got to visit our state's capital and meet with legislators who make decisions affecting agriculture in Kentucky. This was a one of a kind opportunity for me and while I have visited the capitol several times in my life, I had never gotten the opportunity to see how our government works or meet the people who make it run. Working with the state officers of other career and technical organizations in the state, we worked to share the importance of CTE classes and ensure that the funding exists to keep them in our schools.

February has been a busy month, but one that I wouldn't trade for anything. I can't wait to see what happens between now and June!

Next up: National FFA Week! Look for another blog post coming soon!

Kevin Herndon

State Sentinel

My kind of storm!

Typically, I am always afraid of the word "storm." If I hear anything about a thunderstorm coming, I usually pray that nothing bad happens and that the storm consists of five minutes of light sprinkles of rain and maybe one clap of thunder. If I hear that snow is coming, I pray that the temperature jumps 30 degrees by the next day and that the sun pops out so the snow melts so I'm not stuck at home (like I am now.) When I hear ice storm, I literally cringe at the thought of having no electric, no technology, and definitely not being able to leave the house! But from the time my team planned the event, "Storm the State" in November, I was counting down the days until the four day storm was underway. I was so excited to visit a part of the state that I rarely get to visit.

On Sunday January 2, 2011, I was headed for Western Kentucky (which became my home for the week) with Logan and Kevin. This was the day that I had been anticipating for the past month and a half. I was pumped as we drove nearly four hours to get to Audie's house in Webster county where we met up with Jake. Logan, Jake, and I were the "Western Kentucky group."

Our first day of Storm the State was a complete success. Logan, Jake, and I had lunch with the Webster and Crittenden county FFA officers to kick off our first day, then we traveled on over to Livingston Central High School to do our first workshop. We had a lot of fun with the members at LCHS, but our day didn't end there. That night, we drove to Paducah where we went bowling with the officers from Heath and Reidland! Jake lives in Paducah (which is where Heath and Reidland are located) and Logan and I went to camp with Heath and Reidland this past summer, so it was great to be reunited with them!

On Tuesday, we started out the day by doing a first period workshop at Lyon County. This class was a group of freshmen, but they were all very enthusiastic and extremely easy to work with! We left from Lyon County to travel to Caldwell County where we did two workshops. One of the workshops was in Mr. York's room with a very unique class. He had a class of all females and it was a shop class. That was something I had never heard of before, however, I absolutely loved it! Next, we moved on over to Trigg County where we did a double class workshop of over 50 students! We ate a good meal with Graves County that night, but unfortunately, that wasn't the end of our night.

We drove back to Paducah to Jake's house to pack up our things to go back to Audie's for the night, and on our way there, Jake got sick. Logan and I had no idea what to do, so Logan pulled over as often as Jake needed and I called his mom. After about an hour and 45 minutes, we finally arrived at Audie's where Audie's mom took care of him! She ended up taking him to the emergency room a few hours after we had gotten there and it turned out that Jake had kidney stones!! Jake's parents came to get him soon after the hospital visit, and sadly, that ended Jake's experience of Storm the State. (He is feeling better now though!!)

Wednesday morning, Logan and I headed to Henderson County where we stayed for a couple of hours to do three workshops. We headed to McLean County to do two workshops at the end of the school day. That night, we went to Owensboro to eat with the three Daviess County Chapters... Owensboro Catholic, Daviess County, and Apollo. We had around 20 members to come eat with us at Ole Hickory (which is a new favorite place to eat of mine.) That night, we stayed with Kaylee, a Green River Regional officer and the OCATH President!

Thursday, our final day of Storm the State was a big travel day. We started out by visiting with a few members from Ohio County, then driving to Union County where we did another double class workshop, and then to both of the Muhlenburg schools. That night, we ate in HOP TOWN where we had 35 members show up to eat with us!

All in all, the storm that happened in Western Kentucky was extremely successful. We visited with 23 schools, met over 530 FFA members, did 13 workshops, and traveled over 1,250 miles in four days!

The week of Storm the State is one of my most memorable weeks for sure. Not only during my year of state office, but in my lifetime.

Since the snow storm has left me cooped up in my house for the past couple of days, all I have thought about is the previous week that I spent in Western KY. I continuously look at pictures from the Storm the State and I have talked with many people that I met last week!

This is one storm that I was not afraid of. The word excitement doesn't even begin to describe my true feelings I had for the Storm. This is one storm that I would be completely fine with if it happened more often!

p.s - Stay safe in this snow storm that has moved across Kentucky this week!

Alex Land
Lake Cumberland State Vice President