For OCHS senior Andee Dellinger, middle school FFA is where she discovered that her future would be grounded in teaching agriculture.
In a nod to those educator aspirations, Dellinger prepared and presented a lesson plan with a miniature aquaponics system and earned third place in a recent FFA competition at Oglethorpe County High School.
“I decided to do aquaponics because I didn’t really know a lot about it,” Dellinger said. “And when I was in middle school, we had an aquaponics system. We had a really big tank in our grow bed, and I just always thought it was so cool.”
Dellinger, the FFA vice president, was one of five students to compete for Oglethorpe County last week.
More than 400 students and teachers attended the Area 2 Career Development Events (CDEs) on Feb. 10, which included agriculture education, poultry judging, agriculture mechanics and nursery landscape. CDEs are designed to give students hands-on experience in agricultural fields.
Dellinger plans to attend Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and major in agricultural education, which she hopes will lead her back to Oglethorpe County High School to be a teacher.
“It's bittersweet,” Dellinger said. “I’m excited because I’m ready to go to the next chapter of my life, but I’m sad because I’m having me and all my friends are leaving,”
OCHS seniors Ledger Coley, Cole Faust, Caden Berggren and junior Landon Howard earned second place in the Area 2 mechanics competition, earning them a trip to the state CDEs on March 20.
Oglethorpe County has hosted nine FFA Area 2 CDE competitions in the 2025-2026 school year.
“All of the competitions that we have in the FFA are meant to mimic future careers that could interest students and help prepare them for those careers,” said Jordan Paul, one of Oglethorpe County’s agriculture teachers.
All week, students at OCHS celebrated National FFA Week and participated in theme days from “Pajama Day” to “Dress Like Your Type Day.”
“We celebrate the FFA organization for a week once a year, and we chose this week, so the competitions kind of fell in with all of our activities that we’ve been doing,” Paul said. “This was something cool to kind of show off for the school, to show how many FFA students are involved.”