The Lakewood High School FFA Officer Team, with their advisor Chris Hicks and Allison Jennings, the Eastern Region Agriculture Education Coordinator with the North Carolina FFA Association, pose with a big check symbolizing the $16,000 in grant money awarded to the Lakewood High ag program. The group was one of only 20 in the state to receive the funding.
More than $16k bestowed to expand animal science program
If you were given over $16,000 in grant money, what would you do with it? For the Future Farmers of America (FFA) program at Lakewood High School, the answer is simple —members are going to put the money toward expanding their animal science program by building a chicken coop.
The FFA Officer Team and their advisors Chris Hicks and Jessy-Kate Gleen were at the Sampson County Board of Education meeting Monday night to accept a $16,902.59 grant from the North Carolina FFA Foundation and the Tobacco Trust Fund Commission.
Last December, the NC FFA Foundation announced that it had been awarded a grant worth over $300,000 from the Tobacco Trust Fund Commission to fund its Agricultural Education Program Improvement Grant for 2023-24. Any North Carolina Agricultural Education programs in middle and high schools were allowed to apply for the grant, but only 20 programs would be selected to receive around $15,000 per school in grants.
And Lakewood High School was one of those lucky schools.
“We were excited; I mean because, we’re one of only 20 programs in the entire state to get this funding,” Hicks attested. “So, we were just excited; the kids were excited just to be able to expand it. We currently don’t have any animal science facilities on campus, so this is big for that.”
Hicks said the grant money will give them the chance to bring in chickens to the FAA program by giving them the funding they need to build the coup.
“We’re getting an 8- by 30-foot chicken coup, and that will be used by our animal science program, and they’re going to be working with layer protection,” Hicks pointed out. “The layer that we are getting can hold up to 40 birds, so we’re gonna work with the students [and] they’re going to be able to construct a coop from the ground up.”
He said the goal with the new chicken coop is to start a self-sufficient project for the students where they are able to sell eggs to the school and the rest of the community. But he said the chicken coop is just the beginning of them expanding their animal science program.
The Lakewood High School FFA is one of over 360 chapters within North Carolina. The North Carolina FFA notes that over 36,000 students across the state have joined this organization so that they can learn more about the careers in business, science and the technology of agriculture.
The Tobacco Trust Fund was started in 2000 by the NC General Assembly to give away funds as part of the Master Settlement Agreement between the state and major tobacco companies. In in the 24 years that this agency has been running, they have funded over 100 different projects in North Carolina.