Education Week - June 10, 2015 - 8

It looks like a ghost town out there with all the dust blowing."

Photography by Matt Black

ROBERT M. HUDSON, Superintendent, Alpaugh Unified school district, Alpaugh, Calif.

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

Schools, Students Hit Hard by California's Historic Drought
By Karla Scoon Reid
Reedley, Calif.

As Juan Garza, the superintendent of Kings
Canyon Unified school district, drove around
this farming community last month, he slowed
the district's electric car down to point out the
visible victims of California's historic drought.
Irrigation canals filled with yellow weeds and
cracked dirt. Fruit-packing houses shuttered
and abandoned. And homes with crude tarps
and plywood extensions that provide shelter for
families who lost their jobs and housing in this
small community 25 miles southeast of Fresno.
"The worst," Mr. Garza said, gazing at rows of
peach and nectarine trees, "is yet to come."
With Gov. Jerry Brown imposing new mandatory water reductions to respond to the statewide emergency, school districts are grappling
with how to adhere 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 4 percent to 36 percent, depending
on each district's water supplier. They potentially face fines for failing to meet those mandates by 2016.
But the stakes are even higher for some California districts, especially in the central region
of the state. Some wells serving schools are drying up. One district uses a "dust day" schedule to

keep children inside when intense winds sweep
up dirt from the surrounding parched fields. The
drought's ripple effects, however, could prove
most devastating for school systems like Kings
Canyon Unified, where most families work in
agriculture, packing produce or picking crops,
such as peaches, nectarines, and grapes.
The 10,000-student district 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
plant, leaving far fewer jobs for farmworkers.
Mr. Garza said some of Kings Canyon's families-almost 90 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 million loss in state funding.
"We feed the world here in this valley," explained Anita Betancourt, the district's adult
and parent program coordinator and a Reedley City Council member. "But [without water],
there's no work. If families have to move from
here to there to find work, the children are going
to be displaced."
The drought's impact is being felt throughout
the state with Gov. Brown calling on all Californians, including homeowners, school districts,
and businesses to drastically cut water use. To
meet the edict, all districts should be adopting

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 10, 2015 | www.edweek.org

water-conservation plans, said Jenny Hannah,
the chief facilities officer for the Kern County
Office of Education.
Ms. Hannah, who also is chairwoman of the
Coalition for Adequate School Housing, a nonprofit that supports efforts to fund K-12 school
construction in California, said some districts
have already adopted water-conservation strategies, such as installing artificial turf and lowwater flush toilets. Complicating those efforts,
however, is the state law that requires districts
to make school grounds available to the public,
particularly playing fields, Ms. Hannah said.
Water suppliers are offering incentives to cut
down usage and the State Water Resources
Control Board awarded $30 million to districts
last month to fund water-conservation projects.

'Dust-Day Schedule'
By its very nature, though, California's geographic diversity 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
district in Orange County. While the district is
looking to reduce its water use by 12 percent, the
reduction required for Orange County Unified
school district is 28 percent, Mr. Dixon said. He
said school districts would likely need to ask for
special consideration from their water suppliers.

In addition to watering more efficiently, Mr.
Dixon said districts may opt to not water at all.
Green space is almost a thing of the past for
the tiny Alpaugh district, about 50 miles northeast of Bakersfield. "It looks like a ghost town out
there with all the dust blowing," said Superintendent Robert M. Hudson.
Last month, the 380-student district called for
a "dust day schedule" to keep students indoors
and away from what Mr. Hudson described as
the "grit that can get into your mouth and burn
your eyes."
In Orosi, another San Joaquin Valley community, a well at Orosi High School was shut off last
fall after water tests showed unacceptable nitrate levels. Yolanda Valdez, the superintendent
of the Cutler-Orosi Joint Unified school district,
said the district applied for a state grant to fund
the construction of a new well.
Ms. Valdez, a former farmworker, said this
drought is the worst she's encountered.
The Kings Canyon district is experiencing almost every aspect of the drought's fallout: declining enrollment, school wells drying up, elementary students complaining of stomachaches, and
most of all, the anxiety of families desperately
searching for work.
It wasn't always that way. Superintendent
Garza said the district was growing by 300 students a year less than a decade ago. Signs of renewal, like new strip malls, appeared in Reedley,

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Education Week - June 10, 2015

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