LOST HILLS, Calif . - As a veil of morning fog gives way to sunlight, Lost Hills emerges as a town forgotten by the passage of time. Dust from nearby orchards runs through empty bus shelters, surrounds a plantation of almond trees that have been uprooted and stacked in piles that reach 20 feet high and crosses a park of mobile homes where roosters guard abandoned cars and trailers covered in Soot seems to admit defeat. The percentage of residents in this town of Central Valley that has a university degree is 0. Agriculture is a pillar of the economy in this town, but does not provide very good living conditions: the average income of agricultural workers in the year 2015 was $ 17,500, well below the poverty line set by the government ($ 25,750) for a family of four.
However, in the southern part of town, the Wonderful College Prep Academy campus shines with a fresh coat of paint. A bright blue door opens to make way for Acacia Briceño's English class. They are reading the poem "Me too" by Langston Hughes, and the time has come to analyze the third stanza, where the protagonist decides to rise against intolerance.
“We discuss racism, and they are incredibly absorbed in the text in question. They begin to think of us, as Mexicans, and begin to associate such ideas, ”Briceño said later. “They have a very bad image of adults and teachers who have listed them as 'stupid' on past occasions. They have never shown them genuine interest. ”
The owners, who hire a large number of farm workers in the town, built the $ 29 million campus in 2017. The charter school, which serves students from kindergarten through eighth grade, is the second in a chain started by Lynda Resnick and her husband, Stewart. They are the owners of The Wonderful Company, the conglomerate valued at $ 4.6 billion behind Fiji Water, PomWonderful pomegranate juice and Teleflora, the largest flower delivery service in the country. The company is also the largest almond and pistachio processor worldwide.
"This is my legacy," said Resnick from his office at the headquarters of Wonderful, located in West Los Angeles. In discontent with the global but imprecise scope of his charities, Resnick directed his philanthropy to a specific area and began to wonder what he could do for his Central Valley employees. “And, of course, education is the most important thing. I want to change the paradigm of poverty in Central Valley. ”
With some 4,500 full-time employees in the area, The Wonderful Company is established as one of the largest employers in the region, and although its full-time workers receive more than the minimum wage set by the state ($ 12 per hour), many of Your employees barely earn enough to survive. Almost a third of children live below the poverty line in the country. Until December 2018, Wonderful workers received a minimum wage of $ 11 per hour. A year ago, the company increased the minimum wage to $ 15 per hour for full-time employees who were hired directly by the company.
However, many of their employees hired by external contractors earn $ 12 an hour by filling fruit containers. They increase their payment through a remuneration system based on the number of containers they can fill. Even while the company increased the salary of its full-time workers, 1,800 Wonderful workers began a strike after a contractor of the company reduced the rate obtained by filling tangerine containers from $ 53 to $ 48.
Wonderful Education, a division of The Wonderful Companies, runs charter schools that serve children in areas near the company's two largest plants, a citrus plant in Delano and a pistachio plant in Lost Hills where, according to sources The company, one in two families has a member who works for the company. 35% of Wonderful students in Lost Hills, and 10% of their students in Delano, are children of Wonderful employees. Almost 99% of Lost Hills students, and 93.8% of students in Delano, are Latino.
The Delano charter school, which today has 1,800 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade, was opened in 2009.
The university is a distant dream for many of these families: difficult to understand, unattainable. Many parents of the students did not finish high school. However, like many charter schools, Wonderful schools have the university as their vision, displaying flags from the University of Florida and Harvard that wave in the halls and classrooms, and a rigorous curriculum designed to prepare students to enter them. “When we open the school, we consider it important to be aware of the actions carried out by the main charter schools of similar demographic sectors,” said Alesha Hixon, director of the Lost Hills school.
What differentiates Wonderful schools is that they also offer a second academic program for students. At the school in Delano, within the network of charter schools, the “Wonderful Agriculture Career Prep” is a four-year study program with a view to the university that ends with a diploma in the agricultural sector. It was designed to solve the skills deficit that The Wonderful Company faces as agriculture leans toward a technologically more advanced workforce.
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After graduation, the company offers students a one-year work grant, with guaranteed income of $ 35,000, slightly above the average county income. Students who do not accept the scholarship can continue their education at a four-year university with the help of the company.
It is unusual for a single company to assume the direction of a school. Georgia Heyward, a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said that when companies get involved with charter schools, it usually takes place through joint efforts between different partners, not designing and running a school individually.
"It is a situation that is always difficult, when dealing with an entity that has a particular interest," says Heyward. "In the educational field, it is favorable to include the communities as much as possible, in order to ensure that there is no agent acting on their own interests."
The university is a fundamental objective for The Wonderful Schools, but also the interests related to agriculture and healthy food that constitute the core business of the parent company. A few days ago, several sixth grade students crouched down to plant plants that mark the center of the campus. They modified a drip irrigation system that nourishes crops of curly cabbage and broccoli.
Wonderful officials are focused on the school's nutritional program. During the next phase of this expansion, they hope to incorporate an educational farm with the purpose of growing enough agricultural products to supply the school kitchen.
"We are a health food company," says Resnick. "Our actions reflect what we preach."
Resnick says that diabetes is a serious problem among Central Valley residents. He said that many children in charter schools should go to medical visits with family members who, for example, receive dialysis three times a week or have undergone finger amputations due to the disease. "It's a problem that afflicts all of Central Valley," says Resnick. "Therefore, if we educate them from an early age, they will be healthier, better fit and understand why."
Meanwhile, chefs move quickly in the cafeteria while preparing for the hustle and bustle of lunch. The school encourages the greatest possible inclusion of whole grains and agricultural products on the menu. The kitchen offers a "vegetable of the day" twice a week. In addition, giving a healthy touch to what appears on the menu is the order of the day: almond milk with a pinch of cinnamon, for example, or pomegranate juice with apple cider vinegar. All dishes are prepared with raw ingredients .
The Wonderful Company's campaign to establish a healthy diet, one of the fundamental pillars of the school's pedagogical approach, has not been well received by everyone. For students who have been raised with dishes inspired by Mexican cuisine, rich in fat and sodium, a serving of kale with granola croutons might seem like a form of extracurricular punishment.
“When we announced that someone would come to give them a talk about nutrition, they were very upset,” says Resnick. “They are used to having sweet bread breakfast, and we serve a healthy breakfast every day. They have thrown us broccoli. ”
However, over time, the initial gastronomic struggles have given way to acceptance. At the beginning of the school year, chef Kelly Wangard tried to serve a Caesar salad wrap. The proposal failed because the students mistook it for a cold tortilla. The following month, he served Parmesan chicken in a whole wheat tortilla, rolled and served hot so that it looked like a little taco, with a garnish of Caesar salad. The students loved it.
"The transition has been incredible," says Wangard. “Now it is they who tell me what they want to eat, instead of telling them to them. So it is fantastic to observe those changes in your lifestyle. It's something totally strange to them. ”
In order to reduce the cultural conflicts that students are going through, the Lost Hills School has attempted to involve parents, who have a largely limited English proficiency. Part of that approach includes a 10-week school program that targets parents and addresses issues such as nutrition, language development and family communication.
Maribel Vargas, originally from Mexico City, receives with open arms the cultural change she observes in her daughter, a seventh grade student. Because her training has led her to believe that schools always know what is right, Vargas applauds her daughter's healthy eating habits, even if they conflict with her own.
"I don't have the education necessary to maintain a healthy diet, because I don't know how to prepare that kind of food," Vargas explained. “If she manages to adopt her here, it seems fantastic. Today, when I cook at home, my daughter asks if the food is healthy before deciding whether to eat it or not. ”
Jorge Ochoa's work in Wonderful Schools may be a more complex task than Wangard's: convincing a generation of parents that the university is not out of the reach of their children. You must also persuade the students themselves. Some have admitted to being afraid of not being good enough for college or that they are destined to work in the field.
Ochoa grew up in Central Valley, the son of farm workers in the fruit orchards that surround Delano. After obtaining a master's degree in education at New York University, he returned to Delano, where he is director of University Programming at the Wonderful College Prep Academy.
“Our approach is what we call 'from the cradle to the professional career',” explained Ochoa while walking through the sunny Delano campus, a $ 100 million structure that reproduces a typical university campus: a central inner courtyard with adjacent conference rooms , student centers and a cafeteria inspired by the Google cafeteria in Mountain View. "We support our students from the beginning of primary school in everything related to preparing families for college."
Ochoa oversees a series of workshops aimed at parents. One explores the ACT test. Another delves into the FAFSA and the actions parents can take to help their children request financial support from the federal government. The efforts have paid off. Recently, the state recognized the Delano charter school as one of the high schools in California with the highest number of FAFSA applications, reaching a rate of almost 100%.
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Being “ready for college” on the Delano campus also means that, by the time you graduate, most students will have attended approximately 20 college tours. The children of company employees who graduate with a GPA of 2.5 or higher receive a four-year renewable university scholarship, $ 4,000 a year for institutions in the California State system and $ 6,000 for private institutions or that belong to the University of system California, regardless of whether they attend one of Wonderful's charter schools or some other local school.
82% of graduates of the Delano charter school attend a four-year university, and 70% of them finish their studies and obtain a university degree, impressive figures compared to national indices for similar demographic groups. (So far, the Lost Hills campus only admits middle school students, and no one has graduated from high school.) The national university completion rate among low-income students is 9%. In the case of students whose parents did not graduate from high school, a sector widely represented in Delano, the completion rate is around 5%.
“Most parents are farm workers; they didn't go to university, ” says Irelda Alarcón, a senior in Delano who attributes to the school the ability to change the attitude of students, most of whom feel unable to reach higher education. “I live in a Mexican home. My parents did not go to college, so I am the first person in the family to have the opportunity to take university courses. ”
The institution's success rates have been surprising for the company. When school administrators developed the agricultural studies program, they projected that 50% of students would opt for a job at Wonderful. Last year, however, 96% of students decided to decline the position in the company and enter a four-year university.
The agricultural program curriculum focuses on the development of mathematical and computer skills; When students graduate from high school, they also obtain a science degree with a specialization in agricultural economics, botany or agricultural technology, an achievement that generally takes two years of university studies. The Wonderful Company is associated with six other local high school schools to provide the agricultural preparation program, which has an approximate reach of 2,200 students from sixth through twelfth grade.
Company executives, including Resnick, insist that they do not feel discouraged at the large number of students who put the company aside.
"The more I attend college, the more satisfied I feel," says Resnick. “Yes, we could use the workforce, no doubt. But in reality we do everything for the children. I don't have a hidden reason. They can search all day. They will never find it. ”
“Without a doubt, there are children who need to have the opportunity to work in their home community,” says Noemi Donoso, executive vice president of Wonderful Education. For Donoso, the university attendance rate means that the program is a success. “And when we talk to the executives of the company [Wonderful], they just say: 'We will have a position for them when they get their title.'”
In a classroom set in the style of Harvard University, Jessenia Anaya and some of her seventh grade classmates surrounded a plant submerged in a flask. They watched how the plant produces oxygen in full bloom.
Anaya herself has begun to flourish at school. This spring he won second place in a state speech and debate competition, sponsored by the California Department of Education. "The discussions are good for me," Anaya said with such vitality that she left no room for doubt. "I want to be lawyer". The student also wishes to attend Harvard, a long way from the mobile home of Lost Hills where she lives with her family.
Anaya's academic achievements may be exceptional, but her success is a symbol of the enormous progress achieved by the Lost Hills charter school in just two years. Before the creation of the school, during the 2016-2017 school year, only 15% of sixth grade students at the local public school graduated with a good level of English proficiency, and 7% met or exceeded mathematical standards
By the end of the first school year in Lost Hills, 65% of its sixth grade students passed state English tests and 38 percent passed math. Lost Hills estimates that three quarters of its sixth grade students will meet the standards by the end of eighth grade.
Resnick's ambitions for its institutions have not yet been fulfilled. The next phase of development in Delano will run in August, when the campus expands to include a four-year university for students who want to be teachers. School administrators describe the recruitment of qualified teachers to Central Valley as a constant obstacle, despite the competitive housing and salary subsidies Wonderful offers.
Wonderful high school students who wish to stay in the community and become teachers can follow an academic program focused on teaching during high school, and then enter the university on the Wonderful campus to obtain a bachelor's and master's degree in education, all while working part-time in the company's charter schools.
"Our biggest obstacle has been finding good teachers," Resnick said, describing plans for college for teachers. “Therefore, the idea is perfect. We have to train our own teachers. It is the only way".
This story about The Wonderful College Prep Academy was produced by The Hechinger Report , an independent and nonprofit informational organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Subscribe to the Hechinger newsletter.