Teacher Covers Greenhouse, Hunter Education
Lizzi Wilkinson teaches seventhand eighth-grade agriculture at Rocky Comfort and Pineville Elementary schools.
She teaches animal science, conservation, plant science, hunter education and a greenhouse class.
Rocky Comfort has the greenhouse, which Wilkinson has been in charge of for eight years and has turned into a thriving operation. She said she is starting to get a greenhouse built at Pineville as well.
The year before Wilkinson took over the greenhouse, the teacher in charge of it sold $325 worth of plants at the annual plant sale. Wilkinson’s principal doubled her budget of $325, and she sold $1,000 worth of plants in her first year. Last year, Wilkinson and her students sold just shy of $10,000 worth of plants, she said.
All the money raised goes to pay for supplies. Any extra goes into the student account. They have purchased computers, manipulatives and an iPad or two for the kindergarten class, she said.
At Pineville, Wilkinson’s classes landscape the whole outdoors.
“We plant bulbs, mulch, rake leaves — we maintain the grounds, landscaping-wise,” she said.
At Rocky Comfort, every student plants a flower on Earth Day. They plant a lot more flowers there, she said, because they have the greenhouse available.
“The flowers we plant (at Pineville) I either buy with my own money or dig up out of my yard,” she said.
Classes picked all the flowers to dry for seeds in the fall, she said, and they will plant the seeds in the spring.
“It’s a lot of fun. The kids really enjoy it,” she said.
The annual greenhouse sale starts the last week in April and goes through the end of the school year. People come from as far as Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma to buy plants.
“We have people north of Carthage come down here to buy
flowers. It’s crazy,” she said.
The greenhouse has regular bedding flowers and vegetables such as peppers and tomatoes. Last year they sold 450 hanging baskets of flowers and also put together mixed pots for Mother’s Day for students to take home. They also paint old chairs without bottoms and old tires and arrange flowers in them. Old suitcases are also used for arrangements. During the summer, Wilkinson said, she goes to garage sales looking for chairs and suitcases. Students are working now on putting the primer on the chairs, she noted.
“It takes all year to get ready for April,” she said.
Hunter education is another focus for Wilkinson.
“It’s my goal to make sure all my students are huntered certified,” she said.
She certified all junior high school students at Pineville this year. She generally certifies the entire seventh-grade class at Rocky Comfort.
In the past, other schools did not allow her to teach hunter education, and she had a few students who were involved in hunting incidents, she said. One boy was shot and killed. Wilkinson’s husband is a conservation agent in Newton County and wants kids to be safe. When she came to McDonald County, she begged to be able to teach hunter education, she said.
Wilkinson grew up showing sheep from the time she was 8 until age 21. She was always involved in 4-H and FFA. She decided to major in agriculture when she went to the University of Missouri in Columbia. She also earned her master’s degree there. She said she originally did not want to be an agriculture teacher because she had seen the schedule that high school agriculture teachers keep, which is very busy. Then she worked a couple of years as a high school agriculture teacher, teaching a couple of sections of junior high agriculture and discovered her love for junior high students. Now she is happy to have found a position as a full-time junior high school agriculture teacher.