By Julie Luxon, Agriculture Teacher, Madera South High School

MS. JULIE LUXON is one of the agriculture teachers at Madera South High School. She has been teaching at Madera South High School for 7 years and has served as the FFA Advisor for 5 of those years. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Agriculture Education from CSU Fresno and a Master’s degree in Agriculture Education from Cal Poly. Ms. Luxon teaches a variety of courses including agriculture soil chemistry, agriculture civics and economics, and agriculture leadership. She supervises the rabbit cooperative, the market turkey supervised agricultural experience (SAE) projects, and also coaches the cotton judging and job interview teams. 

Even with the challenges of distance learning, Ms. Luxon has helped the FFA chapter maintain virtual activities for the over 850 members in the Madera FFA chapter. This school year the chapter has hosted monthly virtual FFA meetings, held chapter challenges and even held activities for FFA Week that served to help connect members to the chapter and each other these past several months. With her assistance, her leadership class has also reached out to several of our MUSD elementary classes to virtually share their agriculture education lessons that were created and taught by her ag leadership students under her guidance.

Ms. Luxon’s favorite part of being an agriculture teacher is the opportunity to help students connect to the agriculture around them. She has worked hard to create a wide variety of SAE (Supervised Agricultural Experience) projects to fit all student’s interests and provide opportunities for her students to be successful. Through her guidance, over 10 members have been recognized at the state and national levels for their SAE projects. Her passion for SAE projects has led Ms. Luxon to assist students all over the state through the creation of an SAE video database for FFA members to utilize and spark agriculture interest in everyone. 

Ms. Luxon’s passion for helping students succeed in all agricultural pursuits has led to the nomination and election of several Sectional, Regional, and Star advisor awards. Just last month, she was the recipient of the regional Golden Owl Award and will go on to compete as one of 6 educators for the state of California in May.