Daniel Bolen, an agricultural science and technology instructor in Elgin, a small town east of Pendleton, has advocated for his program. His district received $250,000 from the Oregon Department of Education’s Career and Technical Education Revitalization Grant. Bolen has brought in additional funding to strengthen his district’s program and help kids receive more hands-on learning in livestock management.
Bolen was also named the Oregon Agriculture Teacher’s Association Outstanding Teacher this year. We hear more from Bolen on Elgin’s agriculture program and why he hopes to create more opportunities for his students.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Daniel Bolen is on a roll. He is the agricultural science and technology instructor for the small Elgin School District in Union County. In his decade there he’s brought in more than a million dollars in grant funding to strengthen the district’s programs and help students receive more hands-on learning for future ag careers. Earlier this year, Bolen was named the Oregon Agriculture Teachers Association’s Outstanding Teacher. Daniel Bolen, congratulations and welcome.
Daniel Bolen: Thank you for having me on. I’ve been a regular listener for years; it’s exciting to be here.
Miller: I am excited to have you on. What got you interested in teaching agriculture?
Bolen: When I was a kid, I had this little bit of a desire to be a teacher, but I never really found a subject that was interesting to me. I have a lot of grandfathers and great uncles that were educators. I finally decided, “Oh, I’m gonna be a veterinarian,” somewhere around 10 years old. And held on to that desire until I was a sophomore in high school and I took my first agriculture class with my first real agriculture teacher. About halfway through that year, I went, “This is what I want to do.” I loved the hand-on experience and the skills learned, and it fit right in with my desire to be a part of the agricultural industry.
Miller: What you said that you wanted to do was not be in agriculture as a producer, but to be a teacher. As a 10th grader, you felt that.
Bolen: Yeah. Not a lot of people as sophomores in high school say, ‘I’m going to be a teacher,’ but that really has always kind of been my passion. I spent three months … actually that was about the time I went to work for the Eagle Cap pack station up at Wallowa Lake, and part of what I did was to help coordinate a youth horse camp program where we taught kids about horsemanship as part of the Methodist church camp at Wallowa Lake.
Miller: What does the ag program look like in Elgin? What is entailed in it?
Bolen: Our program is more of what you would call a traditional ag program. We cover the four primary areas of agriculture education, which includes animal sciences and production, plant sciences and production, agricultural mechanics – which are everything from welding to household electrical wiring, and those technical skills associated with manufacturing – as well as the agribusiness side of things.
Miller: Just to be clear, this is a lot more than just FFA? I mean, it seems like a full curriculum.
Bolen: Correct. Nationwide, we have this model for agricultural education – we see this utilized across the country in agriculture programs throughout the nation. We call it the three circle model, and we all joke as teachers that we have it tattooed on us somewhere because it’s drilled into us in college. In the three circles to create an agricultural education, there’s the classroom component, and that’s where we were teaching the basic knowledge and skills associated with agricultural careers and agricultural industry.
There is a supervised agricultural experience, or SAE; that’s work-based learning experiences, which is really being brought forth lately through career and technical education across the nation. But in agricultural education, we’ve been doing that for nearly 100 years. That’s where we take those knowledge and skills in the classroom, and we give students work-based learning experiences, whether that’s careers or starting their own jobs or job shadows, starting their own businesses.
Then the final component is that leadership component, where we give students a competitive outlet to put those skills that they’ve learned in the classroom to use in that competitive environment and to develop their leadership skills. The three balance circles together create the whole agricultural education program.
Miller: I’m interested in hearing you say that. So what we now call CTE, career and technical education, you’re saying that you’ve been doing this in the ag world for 100 years under different names. Schools across Oregon have been receiving CTE grants through Measure 98 in recent years. What difference have those grants made for your programs?
Bolen: The Oregon Department of Education, the legislature, have allocated CTE funding in a number of different streams, Measure 98 being one of them. Career and Technical Education (CTE) Revitalization grants is another, and honestly, probably the most valuable one is one that’s called Secondary Career Pathways Funding through the Oregon Department of Education.
I know I have a lot of colleagues that see a lot of direct benefit from, particularly Measure 98 dollars. Here in Elgin, our Measure 98 dollars largely are more focused on the other aspects of Measure 98 that included increasing graduation rates, improving attendance and decreasing our dropout rates. So, directly, my program, we haven’t seen as much of the Measure 98 money. [It’s] been very beneficial to have received grants, the CTE Revitalization grants, a couple of different times, as well as the Secondary Career Pathways Funds, [which] have been really big in our program.
Miller: I mentioned that you have brought in over a million dollars in grant funding for Elgin – not a large district – over the last decade. How have you done that?
Bolen: It started my very first … I think I’d been here two years, or not even two full years yet, and I applied for a CTE Revitalization Grant through the Department of Education to grow our shop program. I came into a kind of small shop. I had a classroom, there was almost a hole in the wall down the hallway. We really didn’t have a lot for tools and equipment, and so I wrote this revitalization grant. I had no idea what I was doing the first time and we got $378,000 to expand our facilities. We nearly doubled the space in my shop area, added a small engines lab, upgraded equipment to newer technical equipment, as well as actually putting my classroom in the shop. So I have a state of the art classroom space that overlooks my shop facility, rather than being in a little classroom down the hallway.
From there I just learned to really evaluate, and look at what the grants were looking for and how to write an application that was meeting with what the entity was looking for. A bulk of the grants I’ve received have been through the Oregon Department of Education, but I’ve received a fair number of grants from other entities as well.
Miller: Should you be teaching a course on grant writing at this point, in addition to ag?
Bolen: I’ve been asked that. One of the things is that, across the state and across the country, we are starting to see the value in career and technical education. When I started my career 18 years ago, that value wasn’t there and we were still recovering from the major cuts in programs through the ‘80s and ‘90s. This shift had happened in the mid- to late 2000s, somewhere around 2010 probably, where particularly the legislature realized we are missing out on an opportunity in career and technical education. So, because people have realized that so many entities now have focused streams of funding … which for what I’m writing grants for, it is easier to find funding for. I’ve had lots of people ask, “Can you help me write grants?” And I’m like, “Well, if it’s in the career and technical education realm, I really know what I’m talking about. But beyond that, I’m not so sure if I’m that much help.”
Miller: One of the big projects you’ve been working on and you’ve gotten grant funding for has the acronym BARN. Can you describe it? Can you describe your vision for us?
Bolen: Yes. BARN stands for Building Agricultural Resource Networks. Our school district has been looking for some time to find some land in which we can build a school, an agricultural learning center, or a barn for animal-based projects. And it really started with a couple out of Canby named Brian and Laurie Field that actually donated a small flock of sheep to our program. And we’re like, “OK, we now need to build something to help grow this from.” We acquired four acres in an industrial park near the school, and I said, “Let’s try another CTE Revitalization Grant.” We were fortunate enough to receive $250,000 from the Oregon Department of Education to get started with that, so that really started the project rolling.
The vision is to create a space for student learning in animal sciences and animal production, and to create … because there’s so many skills that students can learn in those areas that are transferable to so many other areas. So it’s a great avenue to draw students in and teach them skills, career-related skills, that they can then use in their futures. It’ll create opportunities for learning, create opportunities for students that don’t have access to a place to keep animals, to actually have their own animals and raise animals on the site.
Then the other part of that is to create almost like a community center type space that will include a large commercial kitchen and a large meeting space of places that other groups in the community can utilize as well. Then, as part of what we’re planning to do, where the acronym Building Agricultural Resource Networks [BARN] comes in, is getting students hands-on experience with industry professionals in agriculture, as well as in the construction trades. Where our vision is that we’re going to use contractors to get the shell of the building up, but then in partnership with our construction CTE teacher, we are going to teach students skills and construction to actually finish the interior of the building.
Miller: You mentioned the benefits that this could provide for students who don’t have access to land, say, to raise livestock. Can you give us a sense for the range of students that you’re working with? The resources that they may have access to, or that they don’t have access to, or the levels of experience that they come to school with?
Bolen: A bulk of our students in our community actually live in town, in Elgin, and they live in small lots. And if they’re lucky, maybe grandma, aunt or uncle’s got some property outside town, but a bulk of those kids don’t have that. Even though we’re a small rural community, they don’t have that direct tie to agriculture, or even to a large enough space to keep an animal.
We have an amazing opportunity in ag education through FFA, and 4H as well – through the OSU Extension Program – to provide students these opportunities to take responsibility for an animal of their own and raise it, and produce it, and take it to a livestock show and show it, and exhibit it, and then sell it. The economic impact in our region, our three county region, from just FFA students in those SAE projects, market animals as well as others – those work-based learning projects – is over half a million dollars a year, just from our students in agricultural education in our region.
Miller: That’s money going to kids and their families.
Bolen: Correct.
Miller: As I noted, earlier this year, you were named an Outstanding Teacher by your peers, by the Oregon Agriculture Teachers Association. In the spring, you’re going to be up for the larger regional award. What did it mean to you to receive this recognition from people who do what you do?
Bolen: It was very humbling. The first step in the process is that our local area teachers nominate somebody from our district. Our district of ag teachers includes all the schools in Union, Baker and Wallowa counties, so that’s 11 agriculture programs. And the other teachers in our region said, “Daniel, you need to be the one to represent us, and to go for this award this year.”
So I did it, but I was just like, “am I really doing that much?” Because I look at my peers and I go, “Wow, these are some amazing things that my peers are doing,” and they’re like, “You’re doing a lot too.” So when I received the award, I was very humbled. It was just an amazing experience. There are almost 200 agriculture teachers in the state of Oregon. So to be chosen among my peers of that group of almost 200, to represent Oregon at the regional level was just absolutely amazing.
Miller: And finally, you grew up in Hermiston, about an hour-and-a-half west of Elgin. In the scale of Eastern Oregon, that’s very close. But are you in Elgin at this point for the long haul?
Bolen: Yeah, I have every intention of retiring here. Both sides of my family, both my mom’s side and my dad’s side, actually come from around here. My dad’s side of the family, his grandfather came to La Grande from the Midwest to be a science professor at Eastern, and so my grandfather and his brothers grew up here. My mom’s side of the family goes back to the Oregon Trail, and settled in Union County area.
It was part of the desire to come here, and be in the small rural school. I think small schools have a lot to offer, and this is the type of place that I want my children to grow up. When I took the job here, it was intending to be here for the long haul, and I plan on retiring here.
Miller: Daniel Bolen, thanks so much for your time, I appreciate it.
Bolen: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Daniel Bolen teaches agricultural science and technology at Elgin, in the Elgin School District, for 7th graders up through 12th graders.
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