The Up and Coming Teachers of America

Fair Grove’s Future Teachers of America (FTA) club is sponsored by Nikki Kisling, with 20 students in FTA this school year. FTA in recent years has been very involved with the school’s event’s putting in immense effort.

Nikki Kisling, one of Fair Groves teachers and sponsor for FTA, shares the reasoning for the lack of a field trip this year saying, “We typically try to take a college trip at the end of February.  Due to our snow days, it was difficult for us to organize a trip this year.” FTA focuses on appreciating teachers and all they do for the school. Kisling shares, “The last FTA meeting was in April.  We won’t have any more meetings until next year.  FTA has around 20 students.  Some students join FTA because they are interested in being a teacher while others join to show their support of teachers.”

FTA has been around since before Kisling began teaching, but she took over as a sponsor ten years ago. When asked how FTA has changed over the years of sponsoring from Kisling she says, “Some of the activities we do have changed over the years.  For the first time this year, we were able to help with the Holiday Shop at the elementary school.  The interest in our cadet teaching class has increased over the last two years.  This year we had ten cadet teachers.  We used to celebrate one teacher a month to show our appreciation for their hard work.  The past two years we have switched to honoring our teachers once a quarter.”

Makenna Drefke, a member of FTA, shares how she felt about FTA not having a field trip this year saying, “I didn’t mind to be honest. I forgot that they did field trips in the past.” When inquired about what made Drefke join FTA she responds, “I didn’t join FTA actually, I am a part of cadet teaching so being in that class also requires being in FTA.” Drefke shares that her favorite part about FTA is getting to job shadow another teacher for the day and see how they run their different classes.