I come from a different perspective as I started a program from scratch 4 and a half years ago so there were no real expectations. As far as not making anyone mad, you can't worry about that. No matter what, at some point, someone will get mad or you will upset someone or something. As long as it is a minority, you will be fine. What you need to do is change the culture. Start with what is taught in classes. If there were no real classes before, that needs to be resolved ASAP. Be diverse. You will go through a bleeding process and you will find out real quick who wants to be there and who doesn't. If you have a junior high classes or exploratory, start setting your expectations there so that they carry that with them up through the program. Try tying activities in class to different FFA events and CDE's that are not horse related. Students need to see value in the other activities. The absolute worst that can happen is you piss off all the horse people, but gain a whole bunch of others that find value. But it sounds like you need to add some diverse activities. Hope some of these ramblings help. Feel free to ask me to expand on things if you need. Good luck!!!

Michael

I second what Lee says. Establish an advisory council that includes your administration, counselors, and people of influence in the community. Keep some horse pieces but get input from the group on what other skills your students need to be successful in that community. There are a lot of side careers that are related to horses and the skills are transferrable between careers. Where there are horses you need welders for the pipe corrals, nutritionists for the feed, forage producers for the hay. It's a $16 billion industry, I'm pretty sure there's enough diversity in it to find other courses to teach, SAE areas to interest students, and keep your community happy without teaching 5 sections of equine science. Oh, there's a handbook on creating an advisory council in the National Quality Program Standards community under documents.