Longtime Washington agriculture teacher and FFA advisor stands outside Quincy High School in October 2022. Cool will retire after 38 years at the end of the school year. (Matthew Weaver/Capital Press file)

QUINCY, Wash. — Longtime Washington agriculture teacher and FFA advisor Rod Cool will retire at the end of the school year.

“It’s time,” Cool, 61, told the Capital Press. “This is my 38th year in a classroom, and I just felt it was the right time for me.”

He plans to remain involved in judging at fairs and has applied to be on the Washington State Fair Commission.

Cool has operated a custom meat shop off and on. It burned in a 2015 fire, and he has not operated it since then.

“I used to shoe horses; that’s too hard of work for an old man, so I can’t go back to shoeing horses, but I think I’ll cut a little meat, just small — I’m not going to go at it full time,” he said. “It’d be something to cut up some game and stuff like that during hunting season.”

‘Steady need for ag teachers’

“There are just not enough ag teachers out there,” Cool said.

During roll call at a state ag teacher conference several years ago, Cool asked for a show of hands.

About 70% of ag teachers in the state have been teaching for zero to five years, he said.

“And then there’s not much in the middle, and then a bunch of guys in that 30 years and up range that are retiring soon,” he said. “There’s a steady need for ag teachers all across the country.”

For example, Montana has 50 job openings and 77 chapters, he said. Texas has more than 200 job openings, and a “serious need for ag teachers.”

“It’s that way all over the country; there just aren’t enough teacher training programs and not enough kids graduating (who are) traditionally trained as ag teachers,”

Some agriculture teachers can begin via industry, but “sometimes you lose a little bit in transition, people who don’t know enough about the FFA part of it,” Cool said. “Their learning curve’s pretty steep, where a traditionally-trained university ag teacher gets a little dab of all of that.”

During a 2022 profile, Cool called himself “kind of a dinosaur” as an agriculture teacher with a strong farming background.

He grew up on a ranch with cows, hay and horses as an outfitter business. He also worked in orchards and wheat and cut meat through college at his father’s custom meat shop.

“There’s just not a lot of farm kids any more,” he said. “To get them to leave the farm and be an ag teacher any more just isn’t an option for a lot of them. If they want to keep the farm in the family, they’ve got to stay on the farm.”

Advice to future teachers

“The kids are the best part of the job,” Cool said. “The time you get to spend with them in the truck or the Suburban when you’re going on judging trips and field trips, the relationships you build are the most important thing as an ag teacher; it’s the rewarding part of it.”

He noted that he still hears from students from his first year teaching in Metaline Falls, back in 1987.

“You build those lifelong relationships through this job,” he said. “That’s the best part of it.”

“Be the kind of ag teacher that you would want your own kids to have,” he said. “It was how I approached every day in my career.”