This weekend, an ISU club will make over a local high school’s agricultural mechanics department.

On April 13, 2013, the Future Farmers of America and ISU Agricultural Education Club will visit Glidden Ralston school district in Glidden, Iowa to install new equipment in their agricultural mechanics department. This is the first year that the club is doing the makeover; Ryan Anderson, the club’s advisor, came up with the idea.

“As I was going out and observing a couple of new teachers in high schools throughout the state, I started to recognize that they had inherited an agricultural mechanics laboratory that had either been neglected or abused,” Anderson said.

As an agricultural education professor at Iowa State, Anderson wanted to use some of his strengths, including industry connections and the ability to get the industry involved with education to help out high school agriculture programs.

“We wanted to increase the amount of learning in high school agricultural classrooms that will help students in their [future] job,” said Becca Johnson, senior in agricultural and life sciences education and president of the collegiate FFA chapter.

In order to select the school that would receive the makeover, an ISU agricultural education class taught by Anderson reviewed applications that were sent in by various, Iowa high schools.

“Agricultural education teachers and students submitted applications for us to review, and the Ag Ed 488 class reviewed all of the applications,” Anderson said. “They narrowed the applications down to the top three and then sent them to the collegiate FFA/Agricultural Education Club for them to select the winner.”

Glidden Ralston, the winning school district, will be getting all new welders, saw engines, shop tools, a couple of metal saws and two new tractors.

“The students are really excited about the makeover,” said Gary Clark, an agricultural education teacher at Glidden Ralston. “We currently don’t have any agricultural mechanics classes here. We had a couple of welders, but we didn’t have a welding class, and we didn’t have any sort of tractor restoration area. So, they’re really excited about it, and they’ll have [new] opportunities.”

Members of the FFA and Agricultural Education program have shown their excitement for the makeover as well.

“The makeover shows how everybody is excited about helping high school students reach a different level of learning, and it is really cool that all of our club members are more than willing to help,” Johnson said.

When the club reached out to companies in the industry, they were more than happy to donate to the cause.

“The makeover is being funded 100 percent off of donations from industry companies and private donations from individuals,” Anderson said.

With the large sum of money needed for the project, the club was very grateful for the generous donations they received.

“If you add up everything that is being donated and everything that is included in a typical renovation of a high school agriculture shop, it would be anywhere from a quarter to a half of a million dollars,” Johnson said.

Students at Glidden Ralston will benefit greatly from these donations, Clark said.

“The agricultural mechanics makeover will give my students more ideas of what they can do in the future with careers,” Clark said. “We’re from a pretty rural area of Iowa, and a lot of these kids want to go back to the farm. So, this will help them. It will give them the tools to be prepared to work on the farm. It will open a lot of doors for them.”

Anderson plans to make the makeover an annual project.