Annual FFA Banquet acknowledges student participant’s hard work throughout the year

The Pocahontas County FFA banquet was held at PCHS Friday evening. The annual event recognizes the student participants and their hard work over the course of the past school year. Scott Garber is the FFA co-advisor. He said they had around 45 participants in the program this year.

“We do this every year,” Garber says. “It’s just a couple of weeks earlier this year. We try to stay ahead of all the other banquets; the achievement banquets, the senior banquets, the athletic banquets, that sort of thing. We recognized the seniors, our retiring officers, we installed our new officers for the upcoming year, recognized community members that’s supported us over the past year, and most of those have supported us for years and years in the past.”

Awards were presented to some of the FFA participants during the banquet.

“The awards given were Chapter awards,” explains Garber. “They have to reach certain goals with certain projects they’re required to do. Each level gets a little higher. It starts with Greenhand then goes to Chapter, State and American and each one of them gets a little harder to attain.”

Garber talked about how critical programs like FFA can be in an agricultural community.

“I think it’s a huge, huge program,” Garber says. “Very important, especially for the county. I mean, our county is made up of farmers and loggers and just more of a natural resource county than it is anything else really. I do feel like they get a lot out of it.”

Garber said what the students learn in the FFA program, everything from math to public speaking, are skills the students will actually use later in life.

“They have to do what’s called an SAE [Supervised Agricultural Experience] and they have to do a project and they have to show how much profit they make or how much it cost to run their project, and it can be something almost like a family business,” Garber says. “Or it can be as small as somebody who owns one chicken. So it can be a range of sizes. So they get a lot of hands on work and they also do a lot of multi-curriculum things. They have to be able to do Math, business, public speaking, leadership, that sort of thing.”

And the dinner that attendees enjoyed Friday night was prepared by another group of PCHS students.

“It was delicious! They prepare that in the ProStart class, that’s Ms. Mullen,” he says. “In the four years I’ve been here, they’ve done it every year.”

The school year is starting to wind down, but the students still have events lined up for this year.

“Actually we have the CDE events, Career Development Events,” he says. “That is the first week in June in Morgantown at WVU. This year we’re taking the forestry team. There’s a lot of history with the forestry team.”