Rural Issue

Nebraska works to address shortage of ag ed teachers

Due to a tremendous growth of interest in agricultural education and FFA, many states are now facing a shortage of ag education teachers.

Take Nebraska, for example.  Matt Kreifels, director of ag education in the Nebraska Department of Education, says more and more Nebraska schools want to add ag education and FFA programs, but there aren’t enough teachers to fill the need.

“Currently there are 15 schools that would love to add agricultural education to their program starting this next fall semester, if they can find teachers.  And that’s the constraint that we’re at,” says Kreifels. “We’re seriously concerned that we will not have enough teachers to start those programs.  Or that we’ll lose teachers in other programs and not be able to fill those positions.”

To help encourage more students to consider ag education as a career, the Nebraska Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (NFBFA) started a scholarship and loan assistance program in 2014.  At the recent Nebraska FFA State Convention in Lincoln, the NFBFA held a news conference to provide an update on their efforts to encourage more young people to go into ag education.  Speaking at the news conference were Rich Herink with First National Bank and a member of NFBFA board of directors; Kreifels; Emilia Woeppel, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln student majoring in ag education; and, Thomas Dux, an ag education teacher and FFA advisor at Mead High School in Mead, Nebraska.

Here is an excerpt from that news conference.

AUDIO:  News conference to address the shortage of ag education teachers in Nebraska

Following the news conference, Brownfield talked separately with those four individuals.

AUDIO: Rich Herink

AUDIO: Matt Kreifels

AUDIO: Emilia Woeppel

AUDIO: Thomas Dux