Planning and coordination of a proposed school farm laboratory at Mendota High School

This project focuses on the planning and coordination of a school farm at Mendota High School. The addition of a school farm to the agriculture program would provide a tremendous educational benefit to the students at Mendota High School. Experiential education would be greatly enhanced with the addition of a farm laboratory. Students would have greater access to hands-on learning activities and provide a greater opportunity to internalize their learning experiences. The program itself is currently experiencing a large growth period and the addition of this facility will provide more resources for the agriculture teaching staff to enhance the classroom learning environment by utilizing a school farm to supplement their lessons. In addition, because of the make-up and characteristics of the student population of the school, agriculture students generally have few, if any, opportunities to develop their own home supervised agriculture experience projects. This proposed facility would allow for a greater number of students to pursue their interests in agriculture. Currently, there is a great deal of support for the idea of constructing a new school farm laboratory at Mendota High School from students, faculty, administrators and the community. This project will hopefully lead to this facility being added to the agriculture program and put it on par with the clear majority of agriculture programs in central California.