Last week, Yoder Charter School students in kindergarten through eighth grade heard tiny peeps as their principal, Shannon Atherton, walked into the gym in a chicken suit. At the same time, the newly-hired agriculture coordinator Becky King brought in a tub full of chicks for students to raise.
After renewing the school’s charter this year, Atherton said the staff looked to do something special for its students.
Yoder hired King this year to assist with agricultural learning in the classroom and aid teachers as they teach their students how to care for chicks in and outside of school.
“There are students who benefit from having a hands-on project-based learning,” King said. “It will give some excitement and a new added responsibilities for the kids.”
A new chapter at Yoder Charter School. Yoder’s enrollment numbers from last year decreased, causing the staff to look at new ways to attract families to the rural school.
Atherton said many Yoder students live on farms or rural areas, so adding an agriculture program seemed natural.
“All of us sat together and collectively came up with ideas of worms or pigs or aquaculture, a greenhouse, things like that,” Atherton said. “We wanted something that we could be able to market, so we could show what we were doing at the end of the school year.”
Yoder staff eventually chose to have students raise meat chickens throughout the year, and in May, a group of volunteers will butcher the more than 100 chickens off-site.
Each classroom will be responsible for a group of about 20 chickens, beginning in a brooder box.
After the volunteers butcher the chickens, Atherton said the school will prepare a community barbeque to raise funds for next year’s agricultural project.
Atherton met with some of Yoder’s stakeholders and staff to visit Walton Rural Life Center in Newton and learned that sustainability for an agricultural program is vital to its success.
“The projects that you do, you want to make sure and create some sustainability, but you can’t just go spending money and then it gets shipped out the door,” Atherton said.
Walton Rural Life Center includes a goat program for its students, where they care create soaps and other goat milk products to sell from the school directly.
Isis Miller, 12, a seventh-grade student at Yoder, said she is excited to bring some of what she learns at school home since she and her grandmother raise chickens at home.
“I hope to learn how to keep them alive during the winter and fall months because me and my grandma don’t do a very good job,” Isis said.
She is looking forward to what next year’s agriculture project might be. After learning it might be goats, she smiled. “I definitely want goats, 100%,” Isis said.
As reported in The Hutchinson News
