“Finding employment isn’t hard but finding employment that’s going to support a family is another story,” said Daniel Bolen, agricultural science and technology instructor for Elgin’s Junior and Senior High School. Elgin, a small city near the corner of northeastern Oregon, and biggest employer is a nearby mill which can pay well, but requires hard physical work and long hours.
“I see a lot of students work at the market or grocery store or Walmart,” Bolen said. These are jobs but not ones with a thriving wage. This means a lot of young people end up leaving the community to look for something better. He wants to help kids get the skills they need to be able to afford to stay close to home.
Elgin School already teaches welding, fabrication, and other trades to interested students. Now the Elgin Agriculture Education Program and the school’s FFA Chapter are trying to increase their instruction in agriculture and construction, having identified farm and ranch management as a high-wage, high-demand career area in Oregon.
“We have plenty of farms around here,” Bolen said, adding that those in management-level positions are struggling to find talent to replace them. One local ranch had to do nationwide head-hunting to fill a position. Bolen wants to help ensure there’s a pool of local talent among future generations.
With help from donors including the Roundhouse Foundation, Elgin is building a large animal teaching facility, a Building Agricultural Resources Network (BARN), that will help train students interested in ranch or farm management. Students also helped fund the training facility by raising hogs on their current, bare-bones farm lot and selling the animals. “Students have been getting a lot of practice learning how to build fences,” Bolen said.
The new BARN will have teaching space, animal feed storage, and a large open interior space that can be put into different configurations using livestock panels, meeting the needs of various animal husbandry projects. While a contractor will build the outer shell and structural components, students will be responsible for the interior work—a form of on-the-job training that can be hard to come by.
Bolen said they’re hoping the facility will be done in two years. The shell should go up fairly quickly but “Students doing the work one to two hours a day won’t move fast.” Still, he’s glad his students can have this kind of opportunity, not just for them but the community at large too.
“Across the country in our rural communities, there’s a huge amount of attrition in the populations because the communities can’t support them,” Bolen said.
He mentioned as the Elgin community has shrunk, the school and its resources have also dwindled. “It’s reached a point where we struggle to provide opportunities for our students.” He wants kids to feel like they have the option to stay and have a family in the area where they grew up instead of moving to urban areas so they can make a living. “I think there’s a lot to be said for having family close by,” Bolen said.
It takes a little creativity and an eye on the needs of local employers but Bolen and the Elgin School District hope they can make it possible for the next generation to stick around.
“Not everybody’s cut out for college,” he said. “There are great, family-wage jobs in the trades that make even more money than I do.” To get these kinds of careers started, students don’t need formal education, just a little bit of training—exactly the kind of thing the in-progress BARN facility will provide.
