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Some of California’s most acclaimed schools right now aren’t in elite suburbs or wealthy urban enclaves. They’re in a small city in the San Joaquin Valley, an outpost on Highway 99 surrounded by almond trees and orange groves.

By Carolyn Jones

CalMatters

Delano, a city of 50,000 at the northern edge of Kern County, is celebrating academic triumphs at its elementary school district and at one of its high schools this spring. César E. Chávez High School was selected by the California Department of Education as a national “distinguished school,” and last month researchers recognized Delano Union Elementary School District as one of at least 100 districts nationwide with math and reading scores that have rebounded from the pandemic.

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard,” said Superintendent Rosalina Rivera. “But I’m extremely proud of our district. It’s an honor to be recognized for our hard work.”

Unlike most schools that earn national recognition, Delano’s 16 schools aren’t wealthy or backed by powerful parent groups. There are no country club fundraisers. Most of the city’s 8,450 K-12 students don’t fit the usual profile of those who win national honors; they’re nearly all low-income, Latino or Filipino. At some schools, half are English learners. Their parents pick grapes or pack oranges for a living. Many have never been beyond Bakersfield, 40 miles away.

Yet Delano students have reached heights far beyond their peers at comparable schools. In recent years, Chávez students have gone on to UC Berkeley, Stanford and the Ivy League. Several have won highly competitive Gates Scholarships. They’ve become college professors, engineers and entrepreneurs.

Administrators credit a slew of reforms, such as teacher collaboration and the use of data to track individual students’ progress. Schools also offer plenty of support, such as tutoring and counseling, and they hold teachers accountable if students aren’t learning at the level they should be.

“The founders of the school (in 2003) wanted to hit it out of the park,” said Chavez principal Justin Derrick. “They wanted to create a culture where students and staff believe in each other. They didn’t want excuses. They just wanted students to understand their value and know what they could achieve. We still have that culture today.”

High Morale, High Expectations

Since the pandemic, students nationwide have struggled in a multitude of ways: low attendance, lackluster academic achievement, high discipline rates. Many students fell behind during remote learning and never caught up. Others suffered from anxiety and depression so debilitating they stopped going to school. Teachers quit, superintendents burned out, parents grew frustrated.

Delano schools experienced the same challenges as schools elsewhere, with plunging test scores and high absenteeism, but have managed to rebound quicker — in some cases even surpassing their pre-pandemic achievement levels. At Delano elementary schools, for example, 43% of students met or exceeded the state’s English language arts standard on the Smarter Balanced test before the pandemic, but last year more than 47% did. In math, sixth grade scores climbed from 27% meeting or exceeding the standard pre-pandemic to 33% last year.

Many students at Delano Union Elementary, a K-8 district with 12 elementary and middle schools, are still reading and doing math below grade level. But the district’s test scores are rising, and the rate of chronic absenteeism is among the state’s lowest.

That progress caught the attention of researchers from Stanford and Harvard, who have been studying schools’ recovery from the pandemic through the Education Recovery Scorecard. In their latest report, researchers listed Delano Union as one of 100 districts nationwide where scores have eclipsed those from 2019.

At Chávez High, the graduation rate, attendance rate, and the percentage of students meeting the course requirements for admission to the University of California and California State University all exceed the state average. The school earned a distinguished school designation from the National Association of Elementary and Secondary Education Act State Program Administrators, a group of education officials who oversee federal school programs. The recognition was for schools where at least 35% of students are low-income and academic achievement is high.

For Samantha Valdez, a senior at Chávez High, it’s the campus atmosphere that has made the difference. She appreciates the array of Advanced Placement classes and career training courses, but it’s the “respectful, welcoming, friendly” mood on campus that makes her want to go to school every day, she said.

A straight-A student, Valdez starts her days before dawn to help out on her family’s 30-acre farm, feeding chickens, sheep, dogs and more than 70 cows. After school, she practices the violin and plays on the school tennis team. She’s often up past midnight studying.

But she’s never considered slowing down. She wants to be a dentist and believes that César Chávez High will help her get there.

“The administrators always go to our tennis matches. It doesn’t sound like much, but stuff like that means a lot,” Valdez said. “You know they care about you.”

Music, Art and Sports

A big reason for the high morale on campus is a slew of extracurricular activities and electives, including 15 sports teams and a music program that encompasses everything from percussion to choir to an award-winning marching band. There’s a Filipino dance club, an ecology club, a folklorico dance club and almost a dozen language classes for the 23% of students who are English learners.

“It’s an absolute honor to be principal here,” said Derrick, who’s in his fourth year at the helm. “But I’ll be honest, it was intimidating at first. It was like, put up or shut up. You better be successful, because the expectation is there.”

Chávez High is on the edge of town, with almond orchards on two sides and the Wonderful Halo citrus storage facility — shaped like a giant crate of oranges — a few miles away. Clean and modern, the school is situated around a central quad, where students socialize and hang out between classes.

Steven Barker, the school’s learning director, enrolled at Chávez High not long after it opened in 2003 to serve the area’s expanding population. Barker grew up in nearby Richgrove, where his mother had worked in the nearby fields and his father had owned a sporting goods store.

His parents were skeptical at first because it was a new school without much of a track record. But those doubts were dispelled almost immediately, he said.

“I never remember a day when teachers didn’t demand success,” he said. “High expectations were the norm.”

Barker went on to Cal State Bakersfield where he double-majored in math and English literature and was set to pursue a high-level career beyond Kern County when he had a change of heart.

“I realized that in high school, a lot of teachers had invested in my wellbeing, and I had an opportunity to do the same thing,” Barker said. “I knew there was loads of academic talent in Delano, brilliant students, and maybe I could help get them to levels they didn’t even think was possible.”

Barker now oversees academic programs at the 1,300-student school.

“I’d never work anywhere else,” Barker said. “The staff here is dedicated to education in a way I can only describe as urgent.”

Civil Rights History

Long before its schools made headlines, Delano was the birthplace of the farmworkers’ movement. Labor leader César Chávez, a one-time resident of Delano, cofounded one of the first unions for agricultural workers in the early 1960s. The United Farm Workers has since moved its headquarters closer to Bakersfield, but Delano remains a landmark in civil rights history.

Delano still centers on agriculture, but it’s also home to two state prisons. The prisons are on the western side of town, amid a flat expanse of empty land and surrounded by razor wire. Stark and foreboding, they stand in contrast to the lush fruit and nut groves nearby and the majestic, snow-covered southern Sierra mountains towering in the east.

At the Delano Union Elementary District, administrators have a hunch about why their students have done so well since the pandemic: “We went all in with remote learning. We went big,” said Jose Maldonado, the district’s director of data analysis.

As soon as COVID forced the closure of schools in March 2020, Delano administrators launched a comprehensive remote learning program — not waiting for further guidance from the state. They immediately delivered tablets and hotspots to students and researched the best ways that students learn online.

For academics, teachers kept it simple. They focused on basic concepts and limited lessons to short periods of time, so students wouldn’t get bored or discouraged. And they mixed in plenty of fun: dance breaks, games, social-emotional “check-ins.”

They also planned “virtual field trips,” where students explored faraway locations online. One such trip was to France. Staff stayed up late putting together hundreds of kits that contained everything an elementary student would need for a sojourn to Paris: a beret, a baguette, a travel journal and art supplies for a visit to the Louvre.

“Even though we were in the middle of a pandemic, we wanted to make sure the students could still experience the joy of learning,” Rivera said. “We didn’t want them to lose that spark.”

Algebra for Sixth Graders

To help students catch up in math, the district opened math labs at several campuses. At Pioneer Elementary, the new math lab is outfitted with cheerful posters and floor mats showing measurements, multiplication tables and positive and negative numbers. Closets are full of games and brightly colored blocks and tiles for students to get a tactile understanding of numbers and dimensions.

During a recent after-school program, about a dozen sixth graders, many of them English learners, recited algebraic formulas with the teacher and answered questions about x and y equations.

“I love multiplying and adding things,” said student Alexander Ayon, adding that he likes school because “they have a lot of activities for us and they take care of us.”

For April Gregerson, assistant superintendent, the 12-hour days during COVID were worth it. She had a top-notch elementary education, she said, and feels like all students deserve the same advantages.

“Sometimes we don’t even know what’s possible — like a trip to the Eiffel Tower — unless someone shows us,” Gregerson said. “Our commitment is to make sure that our students know that anything is possible for them.”