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