Derry Officer Retreat

The cabin at Pine Ridge Park

Secretary Phillip making corn on the cob over a fire.

After a long day at work, a much needed drive to Blairsville was needed. The newly elected officer team for Derry FFA spent the day building a relationship as a team in order to crank out a lot of work prior to the beginning of the school year. A long gravel road to Pine Ridge Park lead to a cabin in the woods which was filled with leadership activities.

The day started off with picking the Derry FFA Chapter's theme for the year. After some time for discussion, it was voted to have a very fitting them of "New Beginnings".

The officers then went off to practice their parts, and came back to share their parts together in their own opening ceremony. After that, Mr. Campbell thought of a topic for each officer, and they had to write a speech on that topic and perform that speech in front of their peers.

The officers made lunch and immediately went into building their Program of Activities (POA) for the 2015-16 activity year.

By the time I arrived, the officer team was in the middle of practicing their parliamentary procedure in a mock meeting. Each student was assigned an action (2nd a motion, Adjourn the meeting, etc.). 

Once that was over, the students went all out and cooked an amazing dinner. Phil went to making the corn on the cob, Jessica took to making burgers that was actually beef from a steer she raised, and everyone else pitched in to prep the table and make the rest of the food.

This was a first experience for myself as we never had anything like this in my high school FFA chapter for the officers. I highly recommend every chapter to do an event like this, and you will definitely see this future teacher do something similar to this as an Ag Teacher.

President Jessica preparing the burgers for dinner.