What’s Right With Our Schools Northwest Whitfield AG Program

TUNNEL HILL, GA (WDEF) – Traditional classrooms are great places to learn, but sometimes students need to get their hands dirty. That’s exactly what happens at the Northwest Whitfield greenhouse. Let’s dig into their award-winning Ag program in this week’s “What’s Right With Our Schools.”

“Our community is ag based even that they think about Dalton and they think about the carpet capital of the world. Really agriculture across the state and it’s different no matter where you are in the state,” Janet Robbins, Agriculture Teacher, Northwest Whitfield High School.

“There’s something magical about placing your hands as well. There’s this really cool connection to say I learned this in class I learned about nearly bugs. I learned about fertilizer and why I need to do this and I learned about you know how do I feed this plant and make it be productive,” Robbins said.

“We’re always going outside coming up here to the greenhouse, planting plants or going over and making a new flower beds or take care of the bees. We’re always doing something outside and more,” Colter Winters, Senior, Northwest Whitfield High School said.

“Hands on then all the other classes. We get to do cool stuff like this all the time,” Carter Williams, Junior, Northwest Whitfield High School says.

“Yeah, a lot of fun activities to do you don’t really sit in the classroom all day. Kinda get a lot of … stuff to stuff to get out hands-on and have fun,” Beau Bailey, Junior, Northwest Whitfield High School said.

“I like being outside more too, so that’s that’s why I took this classes. It’s, more hands-on more fun more stuff to do and all that so,” Clay Talley, Junior, Northwest Whitfield High School said.

Robins says, “Hands on is the easiest way to apply that information and make it stick in the brain and stay with them for longer than 10 minutes for longer than two weeks or hopefully a lifetime so that they can take that importance and use it later The importance of having young people in agriculture is actually probably more than I can put into words. We won’t be here forever and we leave our legacy through the stories and the actions and the things that we did while we’re alive so now I want to get those students involved in agriculture because they are the next person that’s gonna take over. It’s  gonna feed the nation that’s gonna include the nation that’s the nation and allow us to be secure in our countries ability to take care of its Own.”

“I absolutely love agriculture. I love how we can do things intro, curricular, and extracurricular. We do a lot of FFA like competition competitions and right now I’m doing an egghead competition,” Paisley Chandler, Senior, Northwest Whitfield High School says.

“We’ve had some good success lately. It’s kinda hard not to when you have awesome kids, but we had a group of students last semester that wrote a grant through our Whitfield County Farm Bureau and they received a grant through their education funds in order to do these really cool educational boxes called buzz boxes and so we’re putting together boxes that have all the educational needs for elementary school level teachers to be able to teach you young people about honeybees in the stages of life and it kind of goes along with their curriculum when it talks about life cycles, they got another one through the guild, which is a local creative arts guild and the grant is a lab bomb grant we are working together to show how landscape design as the principles of art in it because agriculture because really agriculture is life in all the forms it’s just a hands-on version,” Robbins continued.

“I Hopefully, you’re gonna become an agriculture teacher as Miss Robbins,” Chandler said.

“Our students are top-notch and I think more than anything. I’m lucky to be a part of a program that’s deeply rooted in its community not because of me but because our community cares about their students and they care about agriculture,” Robbins said.