Major projects accomplished this year

• Major accomplishments for this year: revision of our website for communication purposes with educators; two successful 3-day summer workshops; tabloid to every 4th grade student in our state partially through Newspapers in Education program; implementation of an AITC Ambassadors' program with ambassadors in ten of our counties and one who serves the private schools; first year of our PreK Train-the-Trainer workshop.

Major impacts the program had this year

• With the additional 600+ teachers trained this year, we now have well over 8000 teachers trained to share the positive message of agriculture with students throughout our state. The exponential return on investment is staggering.
• Written responses from teachers to the 4th grade tabloid overwhelmingly indicate that students and teachers learned a great deal about NC agriculture and its importance in their lives. Teachers indicate in the evaluation that it was a great teaching tool.
• Two teachers used their classroom use of Ag in the Classroom in their National Board Certification applications.
• Phone calls and applications for summer workshops indicate that the NC AITC website is a successful tool for reaching educators in our state. Actual numbers were not tracked this year.
• Three of our AITC Ambassadors have distributed AITC curricula to a large percentage of the teachers in their school district; one, with a very large school system, has distributed over 2000 sets of the grade-level AITC curricula to elementary, middle and high school teachers.
• Two community college instructors presented an AITC session at the NC AEYC Conference; most, if not all, have presented the PK curricula to their students or coworkers who are in training to work with preschool/PreK children.