(Le Mars) — The role of a vocational agriculture instructor used to be reserved primarily for male teachers, but more and more women are taking on the position of teaching agriculture. At a time when many school districts are forced to eliminate their vocational agriculture programs, due to budget restraints, Hinton Community and the MMCRU school districts stepped up and started vocational agriculture programs last year.
Stephanie Bass and Sam Schroeder are female vocational agriculture instructors. Stephanie Bass teaches at the Hinton Community School District at Hinton, and Sam Schroeder teaches vocational agriculture at the MMCRU schools at Marcus and Remsen.
Stephanie Bass attended Iowa State University in Ames, but is a native of Connecticut. She was active in vocational agriculture and FFA as a high school student. But, how did a woman from Connecticut end up in Iowa?
Bass says she fell in love with Iowa State University campus after taking a tour. As for getting that vocational agriculture job at Hinton, Bass was hired just one week prior to the start of school. Now entering her second year, Bass has goals of expanding the vocational agriculture program to someday include a greenhouse, and perhaps even a livestock facility. STEM, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics are now the buzz words for education. Bass says teaching agriculture allows her to incorporate several types of science-based programs, and she says that agriculture offers many different career opportunities to both men and women.
Sam Schroeder teaches at the MMCRU school at Marcus and Remsen. She too, is beginning her second year in teaching vocational agriculture in a school district where agriculture is new to the students. Schroeder says she was initially surprised to see a rich and traditional agricultural community not offer an agriculture program. She echoes the sentiment of Bass saying agriculture has a lot of science-based programs, and vocational agriculture offers more than what people tend to believe.
Schroeder says more women are taking on additional roles for teaching vocational agriculture. She says among the 15 students in her class enrolled in agricultural education at Iowa State University, only one was male. Schroeder says she has been fortunate to receive a lot of community support for the up-start agriculture program at MMCRU, saying many people are wanting the program to succeed.
The Kingsley-Pierson school district also has a female vocational agriculture instructor. Molli Griffin has been teaching agriculture for 12 years at K-P.
