Hagerman High School

My name is Daniel Napp and I'm the agriculture instructor at Hagerman High School, and my basic philosophy of education is based around project-based learning. Students learn best, all students learn best when they're in a real world situation in which they're getting their hands dirty and and their their minds in their hands are both engaged, whether it's growing something, welding something, building something, cooking something. That's how students learn best. We rebranded ourselves because we are no longer what we would say, a traditional ag program. And that's when we added that food science component. So to summarize it up, when I started teaching, I took and I taught kids how to make and produce the product, but I didn't teach them how to process the product or prepare them for any food science and processing. And so about five or six years ago, our story started when I reached out to Kurt and I said, hey, the jobs in this valley is all about processing food. I know nothing about processing food. Would you help me? And so we started and you started coming in and doing some labs. One thing led to another. And now I teach the production end in a unit. And then I hand the same group of kids over to Kurt. And then he teaches the processing. For instance, I could be teaching something about the dairy industry and dairy judging and and then they go to court and they would learn how to make cheese.