Teacher To Lead National Workshop

This summer, Southampton Intermediate School family and consumer sciences teacher Christina Cassel will be teaching agricultural skills to educators across the country. She was selected from a pool of 120 applicants to present at the National Agriculture in the Classroom conference in Salt Lake City, UT.

“I am very excited to meet other educators and collaborate with them,” said Cassel, whose workshop will focus on the life cycle of apples and how to effectively integrate cooking lessons into the classroom to teach students foundational skills, nutrition, and healthy eating habits.

The goal of the conference is to bring educators together to collaborate on ways to use agricultural concepts to teach nutrition through reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.

Agriculture in the classroom has become a passion for Cassel. She was named New York Agriculture Teacher of the Year in 2018 and granted a full scholarship to attend the National Agriculture in the Classroom conference in Portland, ME. She was also the 2018 recipient of the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture’s $1500 White-Reinhardt Scholarship, which provided her the opportunity to attend the National Agriculture in the Classroom conference in Little Rock, AR in June.

An East End native with parents who were poultry and dairy farmers, Cassel has been teaching eighth graders at Southampton Intermediate School for the past five years. She studied food service and management and culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI. She is an ardent supporter of organic and local farming, and has taught her students how to grow food in the school’s garden and use what’s grown in culinary dishes.

desiree@indyeastend.com