Young women reign in agriscience
Girls make up nearly 75% of Westhill’s program
STAMFORD — If you happened upon Fairgate Farm on a Wednesday morning this summer, you’d likely find six teenage girls chatting while harvesting the oneacre community garden.
“We’re always talking to someone,” said Diana Kolaj, describing the group’s Wednesday morning ritual as a space for everything from group therapy to political debate to movie criticism. (The girls do not recommend “Midsommar.”)
The teens are summer interns at the farm, located on the city’s West Side, and were introduced to the job through the Stamford Regional Agriscience and Technology Program at Westhill High School, which they all attend.
Westhill is part of a network of 19
“It just always seems to be predominately women who jump for opportunities.” Maddie MacDonald, Fairgate Farm summer intern
such agriscience programs that have blossomed in the state since the first high school Agricultural Science and Technology Education Center opened in the Connecticut in 1955.
Last year, 3,194 high school students were enrolled in agriscience programs in Connecticut and Stamford’s, which accepts students from surrounding communities including Norwalk and Greenwich, has the fifth smallest enrollment of any such school in the state with 102 students registered for next year.
“As someone who has a passion for organic food and the availability of organic food to everyone, I jumped on it,” said Frankie Spinelli Mastrone, one of the Fairgate interns.
The other five interns, all incoming juniors or seniors in the agriscience program, gave similar reasons for working at the farm: a desire to build up the West Side community and interest in environmental science and sustainability.
When asked why they thought the interns were all girls, incoming senior Maddie MacDonald said, “It just always seems to be predominately women who jump for opportunities.”
When it comes to Westhill’s program, MacDonald’s hypothesis appears to hold true.
For the coming school year 74 of the 102 students registered for the interdistrict program at Westhill are female, nearly 75 percent.
It is part of a trend that’s seen an increase in the proportion of young women in the agriscience program over the last few years, said coordinator and teacher Virginia Cipolla.
All five of the program’s teachers are women and for the past few years, the majority of the school’s Future Farmers of America chapter officers have been female. Last year, all but one of the 10 officers were young women.
In this environment, women’s leadership and empowerment thrives, said many program students, who are required to take one or two agriscience classes a year, which all take place in the program’s building on the Westhill campus.
“We have more and more people applying to be officers every year because they know — with the female teachers and officers — it’s an encouraging and welcoming environment,” said recent agriscience graduate Evie Wolpo, who served on the school’s FFA officer board for the past two years and is set to study animal science at Pennsylvania State University in the fall with hopes of becoming a veterinarian.
Ella Cognetti, an incoming agriscience sophomore and new member of the officer board, said she was inspired by the other young women leaders in the program to join the FFA leadership, which competes in events that go beyond farming, such as leadership development.
“All of the teachers are female and they have become great role models for me. I feel I can go to them for anything and they will be encouraging,” Cognetti said. “I look up to the juniors and seniors so much and they inspire me to take on leadership opportunities. I’ve also found classmates who are female and have an interest in science and I think the program gives us a jumpstart in the fields we want.”
Indeed, despite its name, the agriscience program includes a wide range of science courses suc as veterinary science, horticulture, aquaculture, biotechnology, and food science.
“I think it’s important for young girls to know they can go into science and that there’s so many opportunities for them and that as long as they take changes they can do whatever they want when it comes to applying themselves in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) career,” said incoming agriscience senior Dasani Mandza.
Mandza, another Fairgate intern, hopes to study biochemistry in college and said the program has been a positive environment for her to foster her interest in STEM.
Most of the students who apply to the program, however, do so because they’re interested in becoming veterinarians, which may influence the gender gap, Cipolla said.
“I sometimes wonder if part of it is that a lot of kids come to us for animal science and want to be veterinarians, which tends to be a lot of girls who love animals,” the Westhill teacher said. “A lot of times they’ll come to us because they love animal science but later decide they want to do something else like food or plant science.”