Student Farmers at Saul! #SAE

Stephanie Pleasant (right), Baiyinah (left),
Gizmo the Chinchilla (middle)

Today I had a “blast from the past” moment when observing two students from Walter Biddle Saul High School’s SAE projects. If you are unaware about what an SAE is, it is a Supervised Agricultural Experience where students can gain exposure to different agricultural fields in the work industry. I had the opportunity to meet with rising juniors Baiyinah Cunningham and Stephanie Pleasant about their project as student farmers at the school.

To be a student farmer at W.B. Saul, the agriculture teachers ask students to work through the school year and the summer as a paid intern. They have to clock in and clock out like any other job and they also document their chores and challenges they face in their SAE book every Wednesday with the teachers that supervise them. Both of these girls work together every day with the small animals (mice, rats, guinea pigs) and dogs at the high school cleaning and taking care of them. After we sat down and discussed their projects, the girls showed me around the building where they take care of the animals. To be honest, I had a teacher moment seeing the pride on their faces because of the amount of work that they had put into the place!

Ms. Turrentine working with the rabbits with Baiyinah

After the tour and the follow up with my cooperating teacher, Ms. Turrentine about the student farmer positions she made it clear that she wanted the students to gain different “real world” experiences while they were taking care of the animals. If problems arose along the way she would of course step in and help, but she made sure to challenge the students to use critical thinking when dealing with these issues when they occurred.

Baiyinah and Stephanie stated it well when they said “By having this job, we have learned how to deal with real life problems and also work on our time management when cleaning and taking care of the animals.” These girls are on the right path to having an awesome On-Farm Placement SAE project and are working their way into the animal industry.