More agriculture academies are popping up in rural Alberta towns. What are they?
Rolling Hills, Alta., started an academy to stem declining enrolment
The hamlet of Rolling Hills, Alta., appears out of a sea of flat farmland as a checkerboard of bungalow houses and wide lawns.
With a population of around 270 people, the southern Alberta community is big enough to sustain a filling station, an arena and a small grocery store.
At the centre of it all is what many refer to as the true heart of the community: a pre-K to 9 public school serving about 65 kids.
Until recently, the future of Rolling Hills School was uncertain. Parents worried falling enrolment would see their school shuttered, just as sliding student numbers have done elsewhere.
"The concern from our community was the writing [was] on the wall," said Mike Flieger, the principal of Rolling Hills School.
Rather than wait for bad news, however, the community leaned into its rural heritage.
In the spring of 2023, they made plans to begin an agriculture academy, following the lead of at least a half dozen Alberta schools that have hung their hats on similar programs to revitalize their communities and set their schools apart.
"[We] wanted to be a little bit more proactive … we wanted it to be a school that was about something and attract people that were interested in learning based on our approach."
This month, as Rolling Hills School heads into its second year as an agriculture academy, at least six more students have enrolled. In addition, a new bus route has been established to shuttle in kids from the city of Brooks, about 35 kilometres to the north.
But Flieger's experiment is about more than just the numbers.
It also represents a switch to a method of teaching that is more hands-on and rooted in community, a trend in child education that experts say is becoming more popular across the country.
What's an agriculture academy?
There isn't a one-size-fits-all definition for "academies" in elementary and high schools across the province.
They vary in how they deliver programming and whether or not students receive credit for non-curriculum-based activities (a common occurrence at sports academies).
WATCH | What agricultural education looks like in practice:
While some academies in the province, particularly sports academies, come with tuition fees into the thousands of dollars, Rolling Hills School doesn't charge students anything extra to attend.
Valerie Carney is an associate professor at the University of Alberta in the faculty of agriculture, life and environmental science.
In her experience, agriculture academies have typically been part of a "grassroots movement."
She's seeing more of them popping up in Alberta.
"The learning outcomes are prescribed by the government, but how you get students to that learning outcome, the examples you show, the hands-on work that they do, each school has flexibility," she said.
At Rolling Hills, for instance, math is used to determine the perimeter of a livestock enclosure; science comes into play when learning about animal life cycles.
The Altario Agriculture Academy, in east-central Alberta near the Saskatchewan border, has been credited as one of the first agriculture academies in the province.
When Rolling Hills School was in discussions about launching their own program, they consulted with the principal of Altario on how to make it happen.
The provincial government named two other programs specializing in agriculture-based learning for students: The Irvine Agricultural Discovery Centre, at Irvine School, and Land and Agriculture programming at multiple schools in the Sturgeon Public School Division.
Flieger knows of two others he's collaborated with: Mountain View School, south of Lethbridge, and Picture Butte High School.
On Sept. 9, the province announced three new collegiate programs based in Calgary that would offer specializations in agriculture in partnership with Olds College, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), Bow Valley College and the University of Calgary.
A community effort
The province has funding streams available for agriculture-based learning programs.
In the case of Rolling Hills, Flieger said the school didn't qualify. So they decided to do it on their own and turned to the community instead.
Through fundraisers and knocking-on-doors, the school came up with the money needed to start the program. Local farmers, families and agri-businesses all pitched in.
The next step was figuring out how to run a small farming operation on the school's 13 acres (about 5.3 hectares).
"We had a steering committee, [and] not being a farmer, I had people that consulted with me and said, 'OK, this is what we need in terms of size,'" said Flieger.
"There's a lot of expertise in this community.… We have ranchers, we have people that grow purely crops and we have mixed farming operations, too. And people in this community have a lot of equipment, which is helpful for building this place too, right?"
A local farmer brought his tractor to the school to help move corrals for livestock. The Eastern Irrigation District volunteered to run the school's water lines for their garden and crops.
"It reflects the community," said Flieger. "I can't speak [enough] to the amount of people that are interested in wanting to see this be a success."
The school bought two calves at a local auction. Bottle feeding them was a coveted volunteer role for a rotating roster of students, he said.
Then came the goats and lambs, a few of each. They brought in horses once a week from a neighbouring farm for equine care lessons. A field was tilled for a garden and orchard. In May, a dozen ducklings were hatched in an incubator.
Flieger said the plan is to sell the livestock at auction this fall and purchase new animals with their profits. More plans include building a permanent barn for the animals so they can be kept throughout the winter.
New ways of learning
The importance of the Rolling Hills program has grown beyond the border of the school grounds.
Kathryn Holt, whose grandchildren attend the school, said her parents came to the settlement as homesteaders in 1939.
She said the academy is important because of the broad scope of skills it exposes children to.
"I think [the academy] is important because not every child is academic," she said.
"And I think for them to want to come to school, it has to be important. It has to be fun. I think this is fun for them and they're learning hands on."
Flieger said that since the academy launched, attendance is up.
That doesn't surprise Mark Fettes, who studies something called "place-based" education.
Fettes, an associate professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University in B.C., said it's a philosophy that attempts to relate each curriculum topic to the place and community where students live, taking advantage of the resources already there.
"One of the beautiful things about it is that it positions local people and local knowledge as resources," he said.
"What you're trying to do is connect learners with people and places and traditions in the community and in the local region that hold valuable knowledge and can be experienced as relevant and meaningful."
He said place-based education often only partly occurs in classrooms, and involves kids getting outside and into the community.
"Learning is very much something that involves having relationships with a variety of people. So it might be older brothers and sisters, certainly parents, but also perhaps aunties and uncles and grandparents and neighbours … people who maybe don't think of themselves as teachers but are nonetheless very much a part of helping children learn."
Victor Lethbridge, a farmer who has helped out with the Rolling Hills academy, said he's enjoyed watching the kids come alive through the program, and hopes it exposes them to new aspects of the agriculture industry they may not have known much about before.
"Employment within the ag industry is quite broad.… It opens up the opportunity for exposing them to more facets of agriculture, which includes mechanics, welding, accounting — there's all sorts of things."
With luck, he said, that could even mean that some of them return to Rolling Hills after they graduate or pursue education elsewhere.
"The youth going away doesn't mean that they won't come back, especially if there is something that they have connected with in the community already," said Lethbridge.
"We all remember childhood experiences, and if we can instill a positive [one], it's going to be more likely to keep the draw here for the population in the future."
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