Sandy Dale, who serves as a special at MHS, nominated Gray for the recognition.

“I think it’s a huge honor. (For) one, Sandy nominating me was phenomenal because she’s had her own personal child come through the program, and then she’s had a couple of her special education students come through the program as well,” Gray said. “So seeing all fronts, I think, is a big piece, and seeing that it can work for all people is a big piece as well.”

Dale told the T-R she receives a monthly email from the Iowa Department of Education, and one of them urged nominations for STEM teacher of the year. In her view, it was a no-brainer: it had to be Gray.

“(The ag program) has exploded, and what she’s brought in has been amazing. So I’m like ‘She spearheaded this whole thing,’ and it wouldn’t be where it is without her,” Dale said. “And then you take it to the special ed side, and we’ve got kids that, they take a little more. They need a little more help. I think MHS is very inclusive anyway. The kids are out there in classes and electives. Other kids are including them, and they’re doing projects together. But Tara took it to the next step… She took that well above where I thought it was gonna go. I thought they were just gonna enjoy class, but no. She has scooped them up and taken them right along with the other kids and never came to me and said ‘I don’t think they can do this.’ She never said that… When I saw the word STEM, I was like ‘Well, that’s Tara.'”

Gray, second from left, offers a science lesson during the Family Fun Night held at St. Francis Catholic School in Marshalltown last Wednesday night.

As Gray noted, her tenure at MHS began humbly with two classes and just under 40 kids taking them, but this year, her Intro to Ag class will finish with 120 students taking it. The FFA chapter she leads has also grown exponentially and now includes 44 members.

“Being able to grow here in Marshalltown and then have other staff in the building notice it, community members and now at the state level is just huge for us,” Gray said.

Austin Taylor, a sophomore, credited his teacher with getting more students involved in learning about agriculture.

“I’d say that they see how nice she is, and it’s just a contributing factor to welcome people in. And it’s really fun in here all the time. We’re all really social, and we try not to leave people out. We try to include everyone,” he said.

Fellow sophomore Rory Piscitelli first became interested in FFA when she was in middle school through Extended Learning Program (XLP) teacher Ann Jackson and the World Food Prize, and her naturally competitive nature led her to begin showing goats. Neither she nor Taylor is directly involved in a family farming operation, but that hasn’t stopped them from pursuing agricultural education and considering future career opportunities in the field.

“I would say that here at Marshalltown, we can’t think of farm as the traditional farm as the cow, the sow and the plow because I have a lot of students who actually, like, their farming background comes from Mexico,” Gray said. “And so grandma, mom and dad have a farming operation back there, but their farming operation with a warmer climate is way different than what we have here in Iowa. So even the kids that do come from a farming background sometimes, it’s a totally different style of farming than we’re used to here in Iowa.”

Gray, who herself did grow up on a Tama County livestock farm, said she was hired at MHS because of her animal science background through a partnership with Fareway for their meat apprenticeship program, and that class along with her veterinary technician course have become very popular. For the final project in the meat class, students get the chance to butcher chickens themselves.

“Being able to grow up and already do those hands-on activities at my farm and teaching these guys (is great), and thankfully, my farm’s still close enough that I can take them on some tours and do some other activities with them as well,” Gray said.

Today, she teaches 13 or 14 classes throughout the year, with animal science as the most established pathway — though plant science is now sprouting up in conjunction with the completion of the new greenhouse as part of the Career and Technical Education (CTE) project. A second ag teacher has also been hired to take over the introductory classes as they continue to surge in popularity, and that has freed Gray up to teach college level courses allowing students to earn credits through Ellsworth Community College (ECC).

“It’ll start with our sophomores. The goal is, by their senior year, they will have 18 credits of just agricultural college courses. So we have a lot of variety through here. This room never looks the same on any given day. The tables are constantly moving depending on the time of year,” Gray said. “Right now, we’re doing plant propagation. We get that out of the way, then we’ll start dissection. Then we clean out the room, and then we start the beef jerky project. So it’s just a constant flow of different projects.”

Piscitelli is pursuing a future career in agronomy, while Taylor hopes to become a chef operating his own farm-to-table restaurant someday.

“I think I’ve definitely learned from (Gray) more than I have from any other teacher in this high school just because I’m going into a career that I wasn’t born into,” Piscitelli said. “I was born into (the mindset of) you go to college, and you get an office job. And it’s not for me, so being able to go on this pathway of an outdoors job is a lot more fulfilling for me.”

Taylor added that the freeze dried foods project has been a great launching pad for him in selling products, examining processes and changing offerings based on the demands of consumers.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com