By Downtown Cheyenne, looking north. Photo: Vasiliymeshko via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Brian Cox was on a school trip in Billings, Montana, the day after he was named Wyoming’s 2027 Teacher of the Year. Midway through a phone interview with Cowboy State Daily, he broke off to warn a group of freshmen about to walk into a store. “Don’t act a clown. Don’t do anything dumb,” he told them.
That mix of warmth and plain talk is a fair introduction to the agriculture teacher at Cheyenne South High School and Johnson Junior High, who received the state’s top K-12 teaching honor at a gala in Casper on Sunday, Oct. 11. A Wyoming Department of Education panel chose him from among the teachers of the year named by the state’s 48 school districts, Cowboy State Daily reported.
“I was very surprised,” Cox said. He had assumed a teacher of a core subject would win.
From Burns to Pine Bluffs to South High
Cox grew up in Burns, east of Cheyenne, and graduated from high school there. He wasn’t a farm kid in the strict sense, but his family lived on 10 acres, which was enough for 4-H and FFA projects, and he worked on farms as a teenager. He credits two ag teachers, Mr. Bromley in junior high and Mr. Spatts in high school, with steering him toward the work.
He spent two years on the livestock judging team at Casper College and judged again at Texas Tech University. After two years teaching agriculture, he moved to Pine Bluffs, on the Nebraska line, where he taught for 15 years. Pine Bluffs has a lot of farm kids.
Four years ago he took a different kind of job. South High is about as urban as a Wyoming school gets, and most of his students there had never raised an animal. Cox says that’s what makes it fun. “It’s probably one of the funnest, most rewarding tasks, to teach kids that have grown up in town about ag,” he said. At bottom, he said, agriculture is about “teaching people where their food comes from.”
He is frank about the school’s challenges. “We are one of the lower-performing, lower socio-economic schools in the state,” he said. “But I think if you walked through the halls of South High School the pride is incredible, the kids are incredible.”
It was a student who nominated him for the Laramie County School District No. 1 award last spring, the first step toward the state title. Cox suspects a group of them was behind it.
A 406-acre classroom
Much of the teaching happens on the district’s 406-acre farm north of Cheyenne, which predates Cox and exists mainly for students who don’t have room at home to raise FFA and 4-H animals. Right now they’re raising pigs, lambs and calves.
The farm runs like a co-op. Students buy their own animals and feed and take weekly chores in week-long shifts. They also put down a labor deposit, so a student who skips chores pays whoever covers for them. Like most youth livestock projects, the animals are shown and sold at the fair, and students can earn back their costs and then some.
District Superintendent Stephen Newton said Cox has built South High’s ag department and FFA chapter “into a great opportunity for many kids” and gives countless hours to the farm. “The fact that a student nominated him makes this recognition especially meaningful,” Newton said.
Answers versus knowing what to do with them
Cox makes a case for career and technical education that goes beyond the barn. FFA now includes parliamentary procedure and extemporaneous speaking, and he says he has taught future veterinarians and lawyers. “As CTE teachers, and agriculture teachers, we graduate kids that may not have,” he said.
He sees that kind of hands-on learning becoming more important, not less. “Right now, AI is going to give kids answers,” he said. “We as teachers don’t have to give the kids the answers. We have to provide kids with the knowledge of what to do after they get the answers.”
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder said his work “demonstrates the profound impact a passionate educator can have on a community, particularly in the area of agriculture education, which is critical to our state.”
The title comes with a year of public duties as the state’s representative for Wyoming educators, statewide and nationally.
“It’s truly an honor to get this award,” Cox said.
