School Closing Barn Door on Urban Farm

For 41 years, Grant Nielson and his students have tended pigs, cattle, sheep, turkeys, ducks, geese, chickens and rabbits on the five-acre Van Nuys High School farm, but the barnyard’s days are numbered.

Nielson, 66, retired in June from his teaching job. With interest from urban students dwindling, administrators eliminated the school’s animal-science classes, which, like Nielson, had their roots in the San Fernando Valley’s agricultural past.

The move may be only temporary, a school district official said. But the remaining animals, a few pigs, sheep and chickens, will be gone by the end of the summer.

The farm is a familiar sight to residents of the urban neighborhood near Vanowen Street and Sepulveda Boulevard.

Nielson, who has lived in a house on the school site since 1949, said he will remain on the school property as its resident watchman, at least for the time being.

Neighbors Feed Animals

“You’d be surprised at how many of the neighbors are complaining because the animals are not going to be here anymore,” Nielson said recently. As he spoke, two teen-age girls on bicycles stopped to coax some sheep huddled under a shade tree over to the chain-link fence near the sidewalk.

“People go to the market just to buy carrots and other treats to bring back here and feed the animals,” Nielson said. “Others just come here to look or try to pet them. One fellow has brought his grandchildren here almost every day this past year.”

The Van Nuys High farm annex has the best high school agricultural equipment in the district, he said, including a livestock barn that cost $70,000 to build in 1969 and an incubator in which hundreds of ducks and chickens have been hatched.

Nielson has taught hundreds of students how to raise and care for barnyard animals since he joined the Van Nuys faculty in 1944. But, he said, student interest in animal husbandry dwindled over the years as tract houses replaced farms and grazing land. Stiffer graduation requirements made students take more academic courses, leaving them less time for electives such as animal science, Nielson said.

Fewer Students Interested

In 1944, he said, the Valley was covered with “small farms, cattle ranches, orange groves and orchards.”

“A lot of cattle, hogs and sheep were raised here then,” he said. “There was a squash farm where Valley Presbyterian Hospital is now.”

He said 75 students took animal husbandry in 1969, but there were only 30 in his class last year. The Van Nuys High School chapter of Future Farmers of America, with about 150 members, was the second-largest in the state in 1969, Nielson said. Last semester, the chapter had about 70 members, he said.

Art Hanson, an agricultural curriculum administrator with the Los Angeles Unified School District, said that, despite the closure of the animal farm, interest in agricultural classes remains stronger in the Valley than in any other part of the district.

In keeping with the area’s agricultural history, Valley schools still have far more agriculture-oriented classes than schools in other parts of the city, Hanson said. North Hollywood, Canoga Park, Cleveland, Grant and San Fernando high schools still have their own animal farms, he said, and Sylmar High may add animal science to its curriculum soon.

Horticulture to Remain

The only school offering animal husbandry outside the Valley is Narbonne High School in Harbor City. Hanson said horticultural classes will continue to be taught at the Van Nuys High agricultural annex after the animals are gone. He said horticulture and vocational floristry are offered in almost every secondary school in the Valley. A team of horticultural students from Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley will represent California in a nationwide school competition in November, Hanson said.

The principal at Van Nuys High School simply decided “not to have animals there, next year at least,” Hanson said. “The program will probably be brought back sometime in the future.”

Meanwhile, Nielson is busy supervising the closing of the barnyard, which was home to about 80 animals last semester. A few sheep and a steer were sold at auction at the recent San Fernando Valley Fair, he said. Most of the other animals will be moved to other schools or claimed by their owners, who paid the school district to board sheep there, Nielson said.

Photographed With Star

The veteran agriculture teacher also is assembling a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and pictures that have accumulated in his classroom over the years. One picture of which he is especially proud shows Nielson and a youthful Debbie Reynolds standing by a bale of hay.

“That picture was taken in 1952,” Nielson said. “Debbie was just a young starlet then. She came out here to make some publicity pictures. She didn’t go to Van Nuys High School, though.” Reynolds attended John Burroughs High School in Burbank.

Nielson said he taught farm mechanics in his home state of Utah for a year after his graduation from Utah State College, then moved to California with his wife, Margaret, during World War II. “I was going to quit teaching when we moved here,” Nielson said. “I went to work for Douglas on the assembly line,” he said of the aircraft company. “That lasted all of 11 days,” he said, before he missed his old line of work and wrote to the superintendent of the Los Angeles school district, asking for a job.

Worked Nights at Cannery

He was immediately offered a position teaching animal husbandry at San Fernando, Van Nuys or North Hollywood high schools. He picked Van Nuys High School, where he also worked nights at a cannery operated at the school during the war. It canned vegetables that the students and others grew.

When he first started teaching at Van Nuys high, he said, the FFA and 4-H clubs were popular youth activities and there were three animal-husbandry teachers. For 15 years, he has been the only teacher of the subject, which was renamed animal science. He has also taught health, horticulture, guidance and other classes during the last few years.

During his 41-year tenure at Van Nuys High School, Nielson went to UCLA at night and earned master’s degrees in teaching and school administration. He said he will act as a substitute teacher or administrator when needed.

Says Classes Valuable

After obtaining the degrees, Nielson said, he worked nights for the county as principal of Camp Karl Holton and Camp Malibu, county schools for juvenile delinquents.

“I’d finish here in Van Nuys at 4:30, go out to the camp and run the physical education class, then teach an economics class before I headed for home again,” he said.

Nielson said he believes that dropping animal-science classes will deprive some students of a valuable opportunity. “I believe the class keeps some kids in school who might otherwise drop out,” Nielson said.

“Some students relate better to animals than to textbooks.”