Angelo State Agriculture Faculty Members Receive USDA Grant

Angelo State University is topping the charts in many areas this fall, and Wednesday morning, the university announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded agriculture faculty Dr. Kirk Braden, Dr. Loree Branham and Joel (Dusty) Sugg with a $41,649 grant for three years to implement dual-credit course offerings in the ASU Agriculture Department.

The trio’s project, “Enhancing College Readiness and Career Awareness through Enriched Multidisciplinary Agriculture Dual-Credit Courses,” is designed to both expand and enhance ASU’s dual-credit agricultural courses, and the grant will also fund additional teacher training and support, access to Web-based educational resources and an on-campus field day for the school students in the program, said an ASU press release.

Additionally, these faculty members will initially work with school districts in Brackettville, Brady and Wall to implement three dual-credit courses: Food Science, Principles of Animal Science and Live Animal and Carcass Evaluation. ASU officials said high school students in those districts will be able to take the courses for both high school and ASU credit.

“We recognize that hands-on learning is an important part of many of our classes, and that poses a challenge when you are working with dual credit programs,” Branham said. “We are excited about the opportunity to integrate an intensive hands-on campus component with the courses we are developing. There will be on-campus experiences for both the dual-credit instructors we are working with and the students taking the dual-credit courses. Between the instructor training and student experiential learning opportunities, we aim to provide a quality dual-credit experience through these agriculture courses that has previously been unavailable.”

The press release noted that ASU recently implemented its new dual credit program that allows local and area high school students in 15 West Texas school districts to take courses on their home campuses to earn both high school and ASU credit. Those students who earn at least six credits through the program with at least a 3.0 grade point average and submit ACT or SAT scores will be automatically admitted to ASU after graduating high school.

ASU credits the dual-credit program as a major factor in this fall’s record enrollment number of 8,521 students. Out of that number, 1,863 students are enrolled in dual-credit courses, compared to just 79 in the old dual credit program last fall.

Braden and Branham are associate professors of animal science in the ASU Agriculture Department. Sugg is an instructor and the department’s academic outreach coordinator. For more information, contact Braden at (325)486-6746, Branham at (325) 486-6749 or Sugg at (325) 486-6745.