Beebe High School agriculture teacher and FFA adviser Troy Weatherley said he always wanted to be an agriculture teacher, and his life experiences helped him achieve that dream and shaped him into an effective, well-respected teacher among his students and peers.
Weatherley recently received the Outstanding Young Member Award for the state of Arkansas from the National Association of Agricultural Educators. The award came after he was recognized by the Arkansas Vocational Agriculture Teachers Association for his achievements in the classroom and as FFA adviser.
“It’s an honor,” he said. “There are a lot of very qualified young ag teachers in the state of Arkansas.”
Weatherley grew up in Enola in a house that was on another family’s farm. He said he ended up helping the farmers a lot and was very involved with the Mount Vernon-Enola High School FFA chapter. In a corner of his office at Beebe High School, several plaques and awards from his high school days are displayed to show his students that he has been involved in FFA for a while.
“I’m not trying to ask them to do something I haven’t done,” he said. “I was chapter president. I was star chapter farmer, extemporaneous speaker, livestock judge, poultry judge. I was as involved as I could be at a chapter level.”
After he graduated from high school, Weatherley worked as a dispatcher for the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office while going to school at Arkansas State University-Beebe.
“I drove from Enola to Beebe to Conway to Enola five days a week,” he said. “That was kind of rough because I was going to school full time and going to work full time.”
After he graduated with an associate degree from ASU-Beebe, Weatherley went to the University of Arkansas. Being a Razorbacks fan, he said, his options were limited concerning where he was going to finish his bachelor’s degree because “for agriculture education, either you went to [Southern Arkansas University] or you went to Jonesboro or you went to Fayetteville to finish out that education degree, and only one of those has Razorback football, so it was a no-brainer.”
His hard work outside the classroom didn’t stop when he moved to Fayetteville. For the first year, Weatherley worked as a swine-research assistant at the school’s research farm, through which he earned an hourly wage and was given a place to live.
He graduated in August 2008 with his bachelor’s degree, but his graduation timing was not ideal for someone going into education.
“Teaching contracts start on July 1, and there were no teaching jobs available in August,” he said. “I worked for a year for Kinco Construction. That job also unintentionally trained me for the job I now have. It gave me a little field experience so I could know what is practical and what these kids need to know for hands-on construction-type jobs.”
After that year, Weatherley started teaching at Beebe High School. This was before the school’s Career and Technical Center was built, and he said he did not have much room and had to go across campus for labs in his shop. The new building was constructed soon afterward, and Weatherley now has a larger shop, an office and better resources to teach his students.
As FFA adviser, Weatherley said, it’s important for him to instill leadership, growth and success in Beebe’s FFA participants.
“The FFA mission highlights the fact that we try to develop premier leadership, personal growth and career success,” he said. “To me, the premier leadership and the career success cannot come without the personal growth. We expose kids to multiple different areas of — not only agriculture — but of life in general.”
As one of the school’s FFA advisers, Weatherley travels to competitions with the students throughout the year. He said the school’s administration is very supportive of him and the program, and he is able to balance classroom duties, FFA responsibilities, family time and the occasional moment of relaxation because of the support he has.
At the end of the day, he wants to make sure students have what they need to succeed.
“My biggest fear is that some of these kids will graduate, and they’ve never been anywhere, seen anything, done anything, and they’re going to be behind,” he said.
Because of this, Weatherley said, one of his favorite things is to give students the opportunity to travel with FFA events.
“My favorite part is taking a ninth-grader who’s never been out of Beebe, and then by the time they graduate, they are a senior who has literally been there, done that and got the T-shirt. To me, there is no substitute for experience, and that’s what we try to do. We try to give the kids experience in whatever they want experience in, whether that’s in the lab or the classroom, something hands on or at an FFA competition halfway across the country.”
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.