Cover Story
EDUCATION SPOTLIGHT ON
ATLEE HIGH SCHOOL T U R F WMI T HAMN A G E M E N T ARC MORAN
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ur series highlighting turfgrass programs in Virginia high schools wouldn’t be complete without a feature of Atlee High and Marc Moran. The original high school program in Virginia, Atlee paved a path for other schools to follow, and Marc’s steadfast efforts to establish state curriculum and grow a sustainable program have been well recognized locally and nationally. We talked to Marc about everything from the inception of the programming to surviving the unique challenges the 2020/21 year presented in the wake of COVID. Virginia Turfgrass Journal: How did the Atlee High Turf Program get started and what does it consist of? Marc Moran: It’s a two-year turf science course. We’ve been in place as an official program, since 2001–2002. In 2000–2001, I was part of a multi-teacher department, and we were going through some proposed changes in our county, we were moving away from production agriculture and trying to get an idea of where our community wanted us to be. I was teaching landscape design construction, landscape contracting, and I was looking for some outside projects. One of our assistants took over for our longtime head football coach, who had retired. And one of the responsibilities of our coaching staff at the time was to manage their
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athletic facilities and that was across all sports. This particular coach didn’t really have a strong background and asked for help. I have an undergraduate degree in Agriculture Education and also Horticulture, and some previous experience through my work with Southern States, and at home in our farm community. So I tied back to a lot of those things and I said I would try to do my best to help him. I was looking for more projects for my students to work on and we were focused on land measurement. I created a lesson where we plotted points on our playing surface of the football field. The points I had plotted were our athletics logo. Once we had the logo laid out we went ahead and outlined it, painted it. It became our first ever sports turf project — our school logo on the 50-yard line at homecoming. Then I was approached by our boosters and, “We like what you did so far, and can you help out a little bit more?” There was no long-term plan of how to build an agronomy-type situation. So I drew back on what I had experience with when I was an undergraduate and I worked at Southern States working with customers building plans for their lawns and also for their gardens and expanded on that. My college experience in coursework for greenhouse planting, you were on a calendar and we built things based on water sampling and other elements, so it made sense to me to start building some sort of system that we could use.
