13 West Central Valley FFA participants are officially headed back to the National FFA Convention & Expo this year. 
The West Central Valley School Board has approved the chapter’s request to be sent to Louisville, KY for this year’s convention. Students will travel via charter bus on Tuesday, October 29th and attend the convention from from October 30th to November 1st before returning home.
FFA Advisor Jessica Hebert says her students will attend a leadership seminar and participate in a career fair with over 2,500 vendors. These vendors include businesses and colleges that will be handing out information about opportunities for kids to take advantage of in the agriculture industry.
Hebert says she has a record number of freshman and sophomore members of FFA, and she hopes the convention allows them to really understand the organization’s significance.
“Getting them into learning about what other chapters do, what awards they can possibly win, developing their supervised agricultural experience programs–basically just letting them see what FFA is all about. Getting them excited–this is a time not only for me to get excited about FFA, but to get the kids excited so as we do different activities throughout the year, they remember what they learned at convention to carry that on.”
Student Body President and FFA President Jackson Doud will be heading to the convention for the second time, and he says it’s great to meet other FFA groups from around the country.
“You get to see how everybody does things their own way. You get to see a lot of new opportunities you can achieve through FFA. You get lots of new ideas that you can also bring back to your own chapter here. It’s really cool–it’s a good learning experience and you get to pick up lots of good tips about things you can do in your own local chapter.”
The FFA kids will get to have a little extracurricular fun too. Doud says he’s particularly looking forward to two things at this year’s convention: the keynote speech from Hall of Fame basketball coach Rick Pitino and the concert put on by country star Dierks Bentley.