There’s a recent addition to Agriculture Teacher Ben Skipor’s classroom that cost hundreds of thousands of grant dollars: a greenhouse.
“It was definitely hundreds of thousands of dollars and of that about one hundred and twenty dollars I was able to fund from grant application and community donations, from community members and businesses and the remainder of the funds were paid from the school district,” he said.
Skipor wanted a new greenhouse space so his students had a green space nearby during class which allowed them to start class sooner. So two years ago, he started looking for the money to build one using grant money.
“The main reason for construction it next to my classroom was so that students didn’t have to go from the classroom to walk outside and have to go to another facility to do labs and other works,” he said.
Skipor hopes the greenhouse will get more students interested in his classes or interested in seeing the greenhouse.
“We use the garden for a lot more hands on work and the green house is more for lab work”. “One of the biggest reason is the students excitement level about plant science.”” We use the green house for all the agriculture science classes that I teach, which includes the agricultural biology class, the horticulture science class, and urban agriculture.”
Skipor had a talk on which students actually cared about the plants and most students only rose their hand to see the new greenhouse.
“When I asked students from my urban agriculture class ‘Why did you sign up for this class?’ Most of the students raised their hands because they heard that we get to go outside.”
