Credit: Matt Black for EdSource Today

Children at a trailer park in Mendota, California.

Credit: Matt Black for EdSource Today

Children at a trailer park in Mendota, California.

Teaching Week

Reedley, Calif. – As Juan Garza, the superintendent of theKings Canyon Unified School District, collection around this farming community last month, he slowed the commune's electric car down to point out the visible victims ofCalifornia'south celebrated drought.

Irrigation canals filled with yellow weeds and cracked dirt. Fruit-packing houses shuttered and abased. And homes with crude tarps and plywood extensions that provide shelter for families who lost their jobs and housing in this small customs 25 miles southeast of Fresno.

"The worst," Garza said, gazing at rows of peach and nectarine trees, "is yet to come."

WithGov. Jerry Brown imposing new mandatory water reductions to answer to the statewide emergency, school districts are grappling with how to attach to those requirements while continuing to meet the needs of students and communities. As of June 1, districts were ordered to start slashing their water usage anywhere from iv percent to 36 percent, depending on each district's water supplier. They potentially face fines for failing to meet those mandates by 2016.

Lettuce pickers are dropped off in Huron, Calif. Schoolhouse districts in farming communities are worried near losing students as the drought forces farmworker families to motion in search of jobs.

"The worst is nevertheless to come," said Juan Garza, superintendent of theKings Canyon Unified Schoolhouse Commune.

But the stakes are even college for some California districts, especially in the central region of the state. Some wells serving schools are drying up. 1 district uses a "dust twenty-four hour period" schedule to keep children within when intense winds sweep upwardly dirt from the surrounding parched fields. The drought's ripple effects, however, could prove most devastating for school systems like Kings Canyon Unified, where almost families work in agriculture, packing produce or picking crops, such equally peaches, nectarines, and grapes.

The 10,000-student commune is in the San Joaquin Valley—the nation's agricultural epicenter—which stretches from Fresno to Bakersfield. The severe water shortage here has forced some farmers to reduce the acreage they establish, leaving far fewer jobs for farmworkers. Garza said some of Kings Coulee's families—almost xc percent of whom are poor and Hispanic—have been forced to seek work elsewhere and, as a result, enrollment dropped by 200 students in 2014-15. That equates to a roughly $1 meg loss in country funding.

"We feed the world hither in this valley," explained Anita Betancourt, the district's adult and parent program coordinator and a Reedley City Quango member. "Only [without water], at that place'southward no work. If families accept to move from here to there to find piece of work, the children are going to be displaced."

The drought's impact is beingness felt throughout the country with Gov. Brownish calling on all Californians, including homeowners, school districts, and businesses to drastically cutting water employ. To meet the edict, all districts should be adopting water-conservation plans, said Jenny Hannah, the chief facilities officeholder for the Kern County Office of Educational activity.

Children play in an alley in Mendota, California.

Credit: Matt Blackness for EdSource Today

Children play in an aisle in Mendota, California.

Hannah, who also is chairwoman of theCoalition for Adequate School Housing, a nonprofit that supports efforts to fund K-12 school structure in California, said some districts accept already adopted water-conservation strategies, such as installing artificial turf and low-water flush toilets. Complicating those efforts, however, is the state police that requires districts to make school grounds available to the public, particularly playing fields, Hannah said.

Children play in an aisle in Mendota, Calif., one of many farming communities in the San Joaquin Valley that is suffering from the effects of a multiyear drought.

Water suppliers are offering incentives to cut downwards usage and the Land H2o Resources Control Board awarded $30 million to districts last month to fund h2o-conservation projects.

'Dust-Solar day Schedule'

Past its very nature, though, California's geographic diverseness makes it difficult for a statewide edict to be applied evenly, said Joe Dixon, the assistant superintendent for facilities and governmental relations for the Santa Ana school commune in Orange County. While the district is looking to reduce its water use by 12 per centum, the reduction required for Orangish County Unified school district is 28 percentage, Dixon said. He said school districts would likely need to ask for special consideration from their water suppliers.

In addition to watering more efficiently, Dixon said districts may opt to not water at all.

Green space is near a thing of the past for the tiny Alpaugh district, about fifty miles northeast of Bakersfield. "It looks like a ghost town out at that place with all the dust blowing," said Superintendent Robert M. Hudson.

Concluding calendar month, the 380-educatee district chosen for a "dust day schedule" to go on students indoors and away from what Hudson described as the "grit that can become into your mouth and burn your eyes."

In Orosi, some other San Joaquin Valley community, a well at Orosi High School was shut off last autumn after h2o tests showed unacceptable nitrate levels. Yolanda Valdez, the superintendent of the Cutler-Orosi Articulation Unified school district, said the commune applied for a state grant to fund the construction of a new well.

Valdez, a quondam farmworker, said this drought is the worst she's encountered.

An irrigation culvert well-nigh Corcoran, Calif., is just one visible sign of the state's most severe drought on record.

The Kings Canyon commune is experiencing almost every aspect of the drought's fallout: declining enrollment, school wells drying upward, elementary students complaining of stomachaches, and most of all, the anxiety of families desperately searching for piece of work.

Lettuce pickers are dropped off after work in Huron, California.

Credit: Matt Black for EdSource Today.

Lettuce pickers are dropped off afterward work in Huron, California.

It wasn't always that way. Superintendent Garza said the district was growing past 300 students a year less than a decade ago. Signs of renewal, similar new strip malls, appeared in Reedley, abode to about 25,000 residents. Families were buying and edifice homes. Concluding year, the district opened a new football stadium in i of its high schools.

The drought, however, has put the brakes on much of that progress. In Reedley solitary, most four fruit-packing houses take closed and farmers are pulling out their crops or planting almond and pistachio trees which crave fewer farm laborers. Plans to build iii more than schools take been shelved. The district is projecting the loss of another 100 students in the 2015-16 school year.

Miriam Cardenas, the district's health center specialist, said this summer's picking season would exist pivotal. If at that place isn't enough work, fifty-fifty more families might be forced to go out the area. "I think that there's a level of fear growing in parents considering the reason why they came here was in hopes of a better life for their children," she said. "Subcontract labor is what they know…so getting the family and moving seems like the improve option."

Meanwhile, Kings Coulee Unified has tapped its reserves and frozen unfilled non-teaching positions to try to blot the $1 million shortfall. Garza said the commune isapplying for a waiver from the country to compensate some of those lost funds.

The district's newest high school, Orange Cove, exemplifies both the future the district is striving toward and the challenges brought by the drought.

Orange Cove Loftier School serves nigh 650 students, which is less than half of the higher campus-like schoolhouse's chapters. The school is in the city of Orange Cove, one of the land's poorest communities with well-nigh half of its 10,000 residents living beneath the poverty line.

Workers harvest asparagus well-nigh the town of Firebaugh in California's San Joaquin Valley. Some schoolhouse districts in the land'due south farm belt are coping with multiple impacts of the drought: failing enrollment, dry wells, and the anxiety of families searching for work.

Despite the drought, teachers and staff at Orange Cove are trying to keep students' lives as normal every bit possible. Students tin can pay for the prom in installments. Physicals, which are mandatory to participate in extracurricular athletics, are provided for costless.

"[The drought] should exist our concern, not the students' concern," Banana Principal Gloria Valencia said.

But Orange Cove senior Candelaria Solorzano admits the drought worries her. Her parents are farmworkers. She sees that there's little water in the irrigation canals near her domicile. The eighteen-yr-old is all smiles, withal, as she discusses plans to attend a local community college in the fall, rather than Fresno Country University, and then she can salvage money to buy a car.

"I want to start working in agriculture," she says. "Information technology's hard work but I feel like with that feel, I'll appreciate my coin more than."

This story appears courtesy of Education Week. Reproduction is not permitted.

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