A rural private school, where learning is a family affair

Glades Day School students experiment with spreading fertilizer.
Glades Day School students experiment with fertilizer spraying equipment. (Photo courtesy of the school).

It was a busy morning at Glades Day School, when Kalyn Hartley’s agriculture students piled into a van and drove out to the sugar cane fields, where 24 irregular hog pens stood.

Built by previous students, the pens needed to be cleaned and measured so they could be fitted with shade paper. Nails were sticking out, and needed to be trimmed.

The next day, 42 young hogs and steers were set to arrive. The pens would house the animals purchased by students who couldn’t keep them at home.

Students planned to raise the animals as part of the school’s 10-year-old Future Farmers of America program. If they kept them healthy and made weight in a few months at the South Florida Fair, their profits could help fund college scholarships or car payments, as well as the next animal.

“It’s basically starting a business,” said Brody Broedelle, one of the more seasoned student-farmers.

For 50 years, Glades Day School has been a fixture for families in this agricultural region south of Lake Okeechobee and beyond the western fringes of Palm Beach County’s ever-expanding suburbs.

Of the private school’s 289 students, 117 are “legacies” — meaning their parents or grandparents attended. And 57 of them receive tax credit scholarships to help cover their tuition. (Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog and employs the author of this post, helps administer the scholarship program).

Ask a student or a teacher what drew them to this small school, and they tend to use the same word: It feels “like family.” It has a “family atmosphere.”

Amie Pitts, the head of school, graduated from Glades Day. So did her husband, Eric, who teaches math and is the head football coach.

“We are definitely a family here,” she said. “This is our family away from home.”

Glades Day School students ready hog pens.
Glades Day School students ready hog pens.

That family hails largely from three counties — Glades, Hendry and the western parts of Palm Beach — that help form a hotbed of Florida farming.

Eleventh-grader Jamie Anderson said she grew up in Belle Glade, and moved to Glades Day from Clewiston High School, to be with students she had known most of her life. She fit in better here, she said, which helped her raise her grades from C’s to A’s and B’s.

The school has relied on the support of the surrounding community. Local agribusinesses have helped the school pay for a new roof on its building, and upgrades of its agricultural facilities.

Hartley (Glades Day class of 2007) is in her first year leading the school’s agriculture program. She said she hopes increase the program’s emphasis on science, using farming concepts to make the material accessible.

Ninth-grader Jack Hilliard, who was helping fellow students plot a raised-bed planting system, said he’d spent much of his childhood in cow pastures, and planned to go into the family business himself. He said he was looking forward to learning agri-science at Glades — and continuing those studies in college, hopefully the University of Florida’s College of Agriculture and Life Science.

As Hartley sometimes tells her students: “You have to learn a little bit of everything, because ag covers everything, and everything covers ag.”


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.