This week most of my time was spent on preparing for School Tours, the American Royal’s largest education event of the year. Next week we will be hosting over 4,000 elementary students from across the Metro over four days. They will be learning various things about agriculture from how bees are important to agriculture to live milking demonstration. In the afternoon they will watch the Youth Rodeo, which is a fun way to end the day.

I mentioned in my previous post that the project I will be focusing on for this blog is the revision of the Royal Scholars application process. Let me explain a bit more about the American Royal’s Royal Scholars program. The Royal Scholars Program is our collegiate scholarship program. Each year a group of students who are majoring in an agriculture related field are selected to be the recipient of a $2,500 scholarship. We do not just award the scholarship and require nothing else of them though. They will make two trips to Kansas City at the Royal’s expense to help with various events. Last week they attended our Boots and Business After Hours event where they were able to introduce themselves to the business community of Kansas City and do a bit of networking. Next week they will help us with the last day of School Tours and lead workshops on Saturday for Youth Leadership Day, a daylong conference targeted towards local FFA and 4-H chapters. Since we use the Royal Scholars for so much, it is important that they are not only extraordinary students, but are articulate and leaders in their community.

I don’t want to get too wordy in one post so next week I will go over the current application process on what changes I want to make to.