All About FTA

By Grace Sabedra

Are you interested in a school club that consistently holds meetings and provides loads of opportunities? If so, I highly suggest considering Future Teachers of America, better known as FTA.

FTA is a club where students who might be interested in a career with education, participate in community service and experiences related to teaching. Field trips to nearby colleges, shadowing teachers, and helping the community are three main opportunities this club has to offer. It’s also convenient because it allows flexibility to participate in other extracurricular activities and clubs, while still being fully involved in events related to FTA.

If you’re a senior here at CHS or interested in touring colleges in the future, FTA provides free touring experiences once or twice a year at area colleges. In these tours, you will have the opportunity to learn about the education programs these colleges offer. In our previous field trip to Saint John Fisher University, we began the trip with a full inside tour of the campus’s main buildings and a walk-around tour of the outside. After the tour, we had the opportunity to speak with students in the education programs and get insight into what it was like. We also learned about what is necessary to get into this specific college and what achievements should be met to prepare yourself for the university.

If field trips aren’t your thing, that’s no problem either. FTA provides many community service opportunities that benefit our school and our community. For instance, during the Halloween season, members from FTA had the opportunity to help out at the Ledgeview, Clarence Center, and Sheridan Hill fall fest/trunk-or-treats. To be a part of these events, all you had to do was fill out your name and grade on a Google doc, next to one of the shifts. You could choose what shift you wanted to work and depending on what school you wanted to be at, the shift length varied. At these events, you would work at an assigned station, which could be like a craft station for example. This is a really good opportunity to interact with kids in elementary school if you're interested in teaching K-5. 

Another amazing community opportunity is participating in the Wear’N Share Clothing Drive. FTA members will have the opportunity to sign up to be a shopper for either the boy’s clothing team or the girl’s clothing team. After they assign themselves a gender to shop for, they get money from the club. This money is given to your team, to be spent at any reasonable stores in which they can find winter clothes, coats, hats, gloves, etc… After the clothes are bought, you can sign up to help load the clothing items, to be sent away to the Wear’N Share Clothing Drive. Families can come in and take what they need, so they can have warm clothes for the colder months. Also, you can simply bring in clothes from your own home to be a part of this experience, too. 

Another opportunity you can partake in as an FTA member is the Red Devil Buddy Program. This allows high school students from freshman to senior year, to help mentor or tutor students in our middle school and elementary schools. This is a great opportunity to start getting high school students who want to pursue a career in teaching to work with students one-on-one. If this interests you, you can choose to be a mentor or a tutor, based on your personal preference. When you sign up, you have to list the times and days you are available to meet with your student. These meetings are all virtual, but there are multiple seasonal in-person sessions. To make this experience even better, you can choose the subjects you are very comfortable with or are very good at. This makes your life easier, which is a great aspect of this service opportunity. You also can contact the parents and teachers of the student you are mentoring, to reach out about their growth and progress, like a real teacher would.

Another important part of this club is the ability to interact with students and teachers inside a school setting. For example, one of FTA’s most special club opportunities is shadowing a former teacher at a middle school or an elementary school of your choice. The members of FTA will have the opportunity to observe a teacher’s day and also help be a part of the teacher’s classes. They can fill out a form requesting the top school that they want to shadow and their top three teachers at that school. Just in case, you are required to fill in a backup school and backup teachers. When your sponsoring teacher responds, the students most likely write an email gaining all the information they need for shadowing day. When the day comes, FTA students will be given a college-like observation form, where they can organize their thoughts, sights, and experiences neatly. This is very mature and allows students to further invest in their future teaching experiences. 

Another great way to interact with teachers in school is to hear them speak in person. FTA is great at providing guest speaker appearances multiple times a year. These meetings allow students to realize that teachers can have so many different roles in a school setting that we might not originally hear about. This year we had our school library media specialist come in and share insight about his place in the school. We also had a teacher come in and share her experiences from helping kids who are English Language Learners, which is very unique, as well. 

This club also shares its passion for being kind-hearted and happy. This can be seen in the club participating in the faculty and staff appreciation breakfast, writing thank you notes to our shadowing sponsors, making Valentines for veterans, putting together Christmas gifts for staff members, and donating unwrapped donations for a Christmas toy drive. This club is filled with sympathetic, helpful, selfless, striving students, which is something that high schools need to be presentable and strong. 

Depending on how many activities you participate in and your officer application form, you could have the opportunity to be a club officer the next year. This looks very good for college resumes and high school transcripts, but so does being a part of FTA in general. All of the community service and teaching prep opportunities, most likely look amazing to colleges who specialize in education. 

As a member of FTA, it is fair to say we are always trying to promote high school students and even 8th-grade students at open houses to join FTA. Hopefully, this article leans you toward joining the club, which I highly recommend because when life opens up an opportunity, you should take it instead of being afraid or embarrassed to take it. According to H. Jackson Brown Jr., “Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.”