The rise of high technology has helped push agriculture to the margins of school policy. Now, educators and farmers in the North Bay counties are working together to bring it back.
“A lot of kids get discouraged. We’ve seen an increase in dropouts as we keep raising the bar for graduation, and we’re beginning to see a large number of students graduating from four-year colleges who can’t get jobs, because they have no employable skills.” But Nemko also sees the signals of a turnaround today—particularly in the field of agriculture, a Napa industry since the days before plum orchards were replaced by vineyards and resorts.
“We’re recognizing that kids learn best when something is real to them, and what could be more real than agriculture?” asks Nemko, who—as the official who oversees graduation rates countywide—has very practical reasons to encourage the trend toward more career-prep classes: “For many kids, relevant classes are what keep them in school.” And that’s a serious consideration, she continues, now that all public school students are required to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) to graduate.
Learning for real
Farm electives—classes like agricultural biology and veterinary science, offered by the Napa County Office of Education’s Regional Occupational Program (ROP)—can help students prepare for the High School Exit Exam and even earn University of California “a to g” credits. Nemko explains: “There’s a lot of academic rigor in the ag programs; there are lots of ways to teach a variety of different skills. There are math lessons to be learned, manuals to be interpreted, letters to be written about policies and regulations. These are all things that have real consequences.”
The difference between applied lessons and academic study can be critical for many people, including Nemko herself: “We learn most things for the purpose of being able to apply them. I spent my whole school life learning math, but I wasn’t clear what to use it for. So when it came time to use it, I didn’t know which part I needed,” she says. “Math just wasn’t made relevant to me.”
The advantage of ROP classes, each of which is supervised by both a credentialed teacher and an advisory board made up of people working in the field of occupation being studied, is that they’re relevant: both project-centered—“the kids do real stuff” as Nemko puts it—and employment-oriented. “We’re mandated to stay current with the labor market,” Nemko says. However, it’s not necessarily the job market she sees attracting Napa students to the ROP ag classes. Rather, it’s the opportunity to get a University of California credit for environmental science, while working on the small ROP farm located near Napa’s Vintage High School.
“Kids perceive it as much more fun, more relevant-—and they’re still learning state standards,” Nemko says. She adds that occupational classes, which range from criminal forensics and biotechnology to culinary arts and hospitality, can also serve as a much-needed diversion for teenagers at risk: “ROP is an amazing way for kids to get a whole host of skills in an area that they feel passionate about; and at a high-school level, you want kids to be passionate about something that’s positive, academic and leads to a solid future. Otherwise, they may get passionate about things you don’t want them to get passionate about, like gangs, drugs and alcohol.”
State and county programs
The state of California also appears to be rediscovering the importance of occupational education: State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell recently released a report that recommends what he calls “Linked Learning,” connecting academics with “career technical training, work-based learning opportunities and greater student supports.” Linked Learning replaces the state’s similarly buzzwordy “Multiple Pathways” approach with what promises, at least at first sight, to give a more robust role to real-world job preparation.
For Napa students who wish to continue their agricultural education past high school, the Napa County Farm Bureau offers scholarships to two- and four-year vocational institutions through the Aldo Delfino Scholarship Fund, which is managed by NCFB’s Agriculture in the Classroom program. These scholarships, named for the late county agricultural commissioner Aldo Delfino, are earmarked for seniors and college students who plan to work in Napa’s agriculture industry after their training.
Every June, when the Delfino scholarships are awarded, you can count on multiple winners from St. Helena High School, which boasts its own grassroots ag program created by local farmers and grapegrowers a decade ago. “They raised the money, they built the building, they hired the teacher and they have a thriving program that keeps getting better,” Nemko says. St. Helena’s ag program (which, like the football team, has a fervently supportive boosters group) has been so successful that the up-valley district has applied for, and received, $2.5 million in state “Career and Technology Grants” to add more facilities; the next task is to raise matching funds, potentially from a bond measure that could go before school district voters in November.
Across the border in Sonoma County, ag-bound students can benefit from scholarships administered through the Farm Bureau Foundation of Sonoma County, which has announced awards of more than $40,000 this year to “deserving students studying agriculture or an agriculture-related field at a four-year college, junior college or vocational school.” In 2009, scholarships went to two dozen top students out of a field of 45 applicants.
The Sonoma County Farm Bureau is also part of the national “Young Farmers and Ranchers” leadership program, designed for farm bureau members aged 18 to 35, and offers an “Ag Boot Camp” program to elementary school teachers who want to incorporate agriculture into their curriculum. Farm bureau spokesman Tim Tesconi describes the schedule: “Ag Boot Camp is a two-day educational program that includes lectures by leading agriculture experts and tours of Sonoma County farms and ranches. Educators can talk directly to farmers to get the real story about the joys and challenges of farming in Sonoma County. The tours show the diversity of the county’s annual $3 billion agricultural industry.”
Cow licks
Awarding scholarships and training teachers aside, Tesconi says, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau’s primary program is Ag Days, a two-day, all-out, farm-to-school encounter that he calls “probably the largest one in the nation—about 5,000 kids in two days.” Held at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa every March, the Ag Days extravaganza—complete with live animals and hands-on demonstrations featuring soils, plants and even bees—has drawn throngs of eager elementary school students, led by their classroom teachers (and often accompanied by curious parents as well), for 30 years. “We work through the Sonoma County Office of Education to reach every teacher in the county,” Tesconi says.
That includes private-school teachers like Carla Peterson of Pacific Christian Academy in Graton, who says she’s brought her elementary students to Ag Days for “at least” the past 15 years. “Every single person on Earth is involved in agriculture, because we eat food, wear clothes made of plant and animal fiber and live in shelters constructed from timber,” says Peterson, adding that humanity’s cultural development is inseparable from its farming history: “As agriculture develops, so can a culture. When you get fewer people working on a farm, they can participate more in the arts, politics and religion,” she explains.
As for Peterson’s students, they’re simply thrilled to be in direct, physical contact with a world most of them had only known from children’s songs like “Old MacDonald.” One boy, Peterson recalls, was eager for some face time with a cow—getting so close that the bovine gave his head a friendly lick with her capacious tongue. “The kid talked about it the whole year,” she says. “I didn’t think it was that big a deal, but this child was acting like it was one of the biggest treats he’d ever had.”
In addition to her primary responsibility teaching fourth through sixth grades, Peterson also teaches two science classes in seventh through 11th grade; and although her older pupils have graduated past Ag Days, the importance of farming is still a key component of their learning, not only because of its role in human history, but for their own future as voters who may be called upon to determine whether or not agriculture continues to be encouraged in their communities.
The big picture
Teachers in Marin County often partner with the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), the nation’s first such preservation group to concentrate on farmlands. MALT offers field trips and farm days to Bay Area students throughout their elementary and secondary school years; “now, Marin Organic is also scheduling trips for students to visit farms in Marin,” says Alice Moore, director of sustainability at the Marin Country Day School (MCDS) in Corte Madera. At MCDS, farm study is a part of the curriculum for kindergartners and, in an advanced form, for sixth graders, who study food systems on a larger scale and try to answer the question, “Why eat local?” “I think it’s always good to get kids out in the real world to see what’s going on,” says Moore, a longtime science teacher. “Until you can see it, smell it and connect with it on some level, it’s just a token.”
There’s an even more compelling need for kids to understand the basic facts of agriculture, Moore concludes: “The main reason is to understand where your food comes from so you can make good choices, especially when you become a consumer. It’s good for kids to know things don’t just come from the market.” With that in mind, MCDS has a “farm unit” for kindergartners in which they run their own tabletop “farms,” rolling “disaster dice” and “weather dice” to determine their fortunes. “We just make it as real as we can,” says kindergarten teacher Doug Zesiger, to encourage “larger-system thinking, which is so critical to sustainability.”
What do system thinking and sustainability look like to 6-year-olds? A lot like they look to some innovative farmers, perhaps. Year after year, Zesiger says, his MCDS kindergartners have come up with “creative inspirations” when challenged to solve problems like irrigating an arid field on the tabletop farm, a task achieved one year with water balloons, a ramp lined with pins and “100 kids watching us each time,” he recalls. “It was hilarious to see this Rube Goldberg machine in operation, but it was engineering genius.” And it worked—not only to deliver the needed water, but to affirm that farming both calls for and rewards creativity, resourcefulness and teamwork.
This year, MCDS students got a farm visit without leaving their bayside campus when Paul Kolling of Nana Mae’s Organics in Sebastopol, grower of the heirloom apples that are available in bins for the school community throughout the fall, gave a talk about growing organic fruit. The youngsters “just loved it,” Moore recalls. “They wanted to ask him all these questions.” And because Kolling helped them understand more about organic growing, she continues, students who might formerly have rejected a blemished apple have seemed a bit less picky since he visited them. “It changes the way you look at it,” she says. “Not everything looks perfect, but since you know the farmer who grew it, you don’t seem to notice the imperfections quite so much.”
Marin County Agricultural Commissioner Stacy K. Carlsen also sounds a personal note, while carefully avoiding the endorsement of any particular farming or instructional method: “Food requires a family and people to grow it: to nurture if its animals and, if it’s a crop, to make sure it’s grown properly,” he says. “There’s always a family.”
