Build a home, fix a car, get a job: How an innovative school is keeping kids out of jail

SALINAS, Calif. – Superior Court Judge John Phillips remembers the day 23 years ago as if it were yesterday.

A kid who had committed a murder stood in his courtroom, a young man who was still angry and unrepentant. Then the boy’s grandmother entered.

"He broke down and started crying," Phillips said. "He was just a kid. And I’m thinking, 'I’m sending kids to prison for life.'"

Phillips, now 81, had seen it all in 13 years as a district attorney and then 21 as a judge. Shootings, thefts, assault. He handed out difficult sentences, but he was troubled by the stories of many children who went through his courtroom.

"It's very easy to pull a trigger if you don't have any future, you don't have any goals and you don't have anything to look forward to," he said.

That day in 2000 he became determined to do something different, something that would give the children he saw in court a chance to overcome the poverty, dysfunction, trauma and pain so many of them had experienced. To help them find a new way in life, a path toward college or a good-paying job.

Phillips remembered a broken-down, overgrown site up in the hills at the far eastern end of Salinas, a California farm town. The Natividad Boys’ Ranch was a moldering wreck, a juvenile incarceration facility that had been left to rot after it closed in 1982. Why, he thought, couldn’t it be turned into something to help the children of Monterey County before they arrived at a police station or stood before a judge?

Today, Rancho Cielo looks more like a high-end private school than a place of last resort for kids for whom regular high school isn't working. New, colorful buildings abound, full of light-filled rooms with nooks to read in, workshops to tinker in and classes to learn in. There are horses to ride, bees to tend, bike paths to explore.

Each year, about 220 students in Monterey County ages 16 to 24 choose to come here. No one is placed against their will, and not all make it. But those who attend find themselves enveloped in a supportive, therapeutic but rigorous program that pushes them to places they never imagined possible.

“What they’re doing is awesome,” said Liz Steyer, director of the California Institute on Law, Neuroscience and Education, which is studying the program to see how it might be replicated elsewhere.

The audacious effort succeeded. The Ranch opened in 2003. Though 40% of young people who go through the county’s juvenile justice system have another encounter with the law, 84.8% graduating from Rancho Cielo do not re-offend. (That's among students who had already encountered the criminal justice system.)

And instead of the more than $110,000 a year it costs to incarcerate a juvenile in the county, Rancho Cielo costs $25,000 a year.

It has become so successful that increasingly students are choosing it not because of brushes with the law but because they want a more hands-on program that will give them the support they couldn't get in a traditional high school.

Students build their lives and a home

On a clear Friday a week before Thanksgiving, Julieta Mendoza-Alba, 17, gave a tour of a small home that she and fellow students in the Rancho Cielo construction team had spent the last nine months building. She beamed as she explained the air circulation system that kept the home's air healthy, the modular building techniques that made it possible to easily move it, the cork exterior that provides insulation and fire and water resistance.

She was part of the Rancho Cielo team that in October entered the house it had designed and built into the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon. The task was to build a net-zero model home that was both a solution to the state’s housing crisis and a model for the fight against climate change.

They went up against 13 other schools, all of them universities, including Brigham Young, Virginia Tech and the engineering program at the University of California, Irvine. The Rancho Cielo team spent 23 days in Orange County, with Mendoza as one of their spokespeople, leading tours and answering questions.

They were the smallest school, the only high school and the program with the least resources.

In a stunning upset, Rancho Cielo won.

Mendoza grinned as she described it. Her local high school hadn't been a place she could thrive. “It was just sitting in class. There wasn’t the support I needed,” she said.

The Ranch led to a transformation. She has gone from being shy and disconnected from school to excited about her future.

“I learned to use a nail gun, to hang drywall, to paint,” she said, running her hand over the home’s exterior wall. She now wants to go into construction management when she graduates.

“I have a friend taking carpentry at Alvarez," she said of her old high school. "They just build birdhouses. We build real houses.”

Organizers went looking for kids to help

Monterey County is about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Green and verdant in some places, brown and dry in others, the county is a study in contrasts. The Monterey Peninsula along the coast is home to some of the wealthiest areas in America, including the legendary Pebble Beach Golf Links, Carmel-By-The-Sea (where Clint Eastwood was once mayor) and the town of Monterey, home of the acclaimed Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Inland is the Salinas Valley, a rich agricultural area known as "The Salad Bowl of America," where more than 60% of the nation’s leaf lettuce is grown and 48% of its broccoli.

Inland areas are much poorer. There is violence and gang activity, and in 2008 Salinas became known as the youth homicide capital of America. The year 2015 was even worse.

"I stopped counting at 26 murders," said Chris Devers, Rancho Cielo's CEO. He had worked for years in Monterey County's Office of Education's alternative programs. "We had to do something."

To help turn things around, the Ranch went looking for the kids who needed the program most instead of waiting for them to come to the Ranch.

“County jail, foster programs, homeless, juvenile detention facilities. I kept saying, ‘Hey, you got a kid for us?’” said Joe DeRuosi, director of the school’s College, Career and Technical program. “We were looking for the worst of the worst.”

The students' behavior "isn’t who they are, it’s a product of the environments they’ve been in and the things they’re going through," DeRuosi said. Every child arrives with socio-emotional challenges. The staff's job is to turn things around, and their zeal is apparent.

"When we get them," DeRuosi said, "they become the best of the best.”

The Ranch does its work using a unique funding model that allows for extras public schools can't always afford and training opportunities that are remarkable, said Steyer, who has spent her career working with abused and at-risk children.

"It's a public-private partnership in a way that we don't see enough of," she said. "They have restaurant and hotel owners, local businesses and local politicians, everyone coming together on behalf of these young people. It’s across the aisle politically."

Teaching the things some kids take for granted

The school provides intensive support and intervention to help students heal and succeed. It’s the kind of support middle-class families might take for granted, but for many of these students it’s new.

If they need clothes, they get clothes. If they need transportation, they get a bus pass. If they need help with math or English or any other subject, they get it. Many students didn't have the money to pay for drivers ed, which isn't typically offered in California high schools anymore. Rancho Cielo created a driving instruction program and last year drove 38 students to the DMV, where they earned their licenses.

Enrichment programs teach everything from horseback riding to bike riding, along with the chance to work with the school's beekeeper or fish in one of its ponds.

Students also learn to write a resume and a cover letter and how to interview for a job. Dozens of business leaders come to run mock interviews so the young people can test their skills.

"It's cool," said Omar Amezola, 17. He doesn't mind the "upstairs" classes, which are more academic because there's so much time in the shops. "In my other school, it was all reading and writing. Here the teachers are more chill. You don't have to stay in your seat all day. You can do things that are hands-on."

Preparing students for college or a good job

Students at Rancho Cielo are offered multiple tracks. Some arrive with so few high school credits that a GED (known as a High School Equivalency test in California) makes the most sense. Others graduate through the diploma program at John Muir Charter School, which offers academic and career pathways. Many continue to full-time and community college.

There are also multiple vocational programs:

• Construction and sustainable design
• Auto and diesel repair
• Welding and fabrication
• Culinary academy
• Agricultural technology

The Ranch also thinks way outside the box when it comes to skills. It has long had an automotive and diesel mechanic program to teach students car and truck repair. But recently, Ranch leaders realized their county is also home to a high concentration of vintage-car aficionados and the iconic Concours d'Elegance classic car show in Pebble Beach.

So they expanded the program to include a focus on vintage auto repair.

"The mechanics who do this work are starting to retire. They need someone to take their place," said Christopher Almaraz, the technical education program coordinator.

The Concours and others donated $100,000, and Judge Phillips threw in a 1952 Mercedes. "We're going to rebuild and repair it and then auction it off at our next fundraiser," DeRuosi said.

This model could be expanded to other counties and even other states – and it's needed, said Walt Duflock, a board member and vice president of innovation at Western Growers.

"We got rid of vocational programs in the United States, but these are solid, well-paying jobs,” he said. “My members are desperate for people who can run complex machinery and manage critical systems.”

There are lots of places such public-private partnerships could work, he believes. “With everything we know, what it took the judge 20 years to figure out, others could do in five or 10."

Drawing more students

Rancho Cielo began with 94 students and today has 214. It has gone from being a school of last resort for young people in serious trouble to a place students around the county think about when regular high school isn’t working for them.

“Kids are now coming here because they want the vocational training,” said Gabriela Manzo, lead case manager for the school. The goal now is to reach "at-promise" students before they are caught up in the system.

Though there are fewer kids in trouble with the law, almost all come from struggling families. About 96% of students are Latino, and 69% of students come from families living at poverty level. That’s a four-person household earning just $19,000 a year. The rest are low-income.

“A student might say, ‘My dad walked out last night and we’re trying to pay the rent.’ How can we expect them to sit in class when they’re worried about their family?” Manzo said.          

Others simply need a place where someone is paying attention and giving them the encouragement they need to thrive. The culinary arts program is known countywide for its Friday night prix fixe gourmet dinner for the community at $50 a head. Last week the restaurant was packed with more than 60 guests.

Training presumes nothing and teaches everything. “Some of our students have never been to a sit-down restaurant before,” said Laura Nicola, co-manager of the restaurant who also works at La Bicyclette, a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in Carmel.

“They start out scared," she said. "We’re about building them up. Whether or not they go into food service, they learn to talk to people, to interact. They learn they have worth.”

On Friday the offerings included roasted cauliflower soup, fricasseed chicken, butternut squash ravioli and a choice of pistachio panna cotta, chocolate tart or honey gelato made with honey from the school’s own hives.

Server Yaritsa Vargas, 16, began at the school four months ago. “I had severe social anxiety. I had panic attacks and couldn’t go to school. I lost two years,” she said.

She had just spent five minutes confidently going through the menu and offering suggestions to a table full of customers, asking about food allergies and preferences.

“At the Ranch, they help you. They don’t expect you just to know how to do things, they teach you, they support you.” She reached out to straighten a table setting. “They kept me going and they believed in me. They made me feel proud of me.”