Urban Plowboys Crop Up Among City Slicker Kids

Wearing a hot-pink Mickey Mouse sweat shirt, a long, white fringed scarf draped around his neck, Robert Bennish, president of Canoga Park High School’s chapter of Future Farmers of America, stood beside the swine pen on the southeast corner of campus and talked livestock--his ewe and the two little lambs she’d borne three weeks ago.

A few miles away at San Fernando Junior High School, three eighth-grade girls, each squeezed into white pants and hot-colored sweaters, protested teacher Joe Montanez’s instructions to sit on the cement walk they’d helped build in horticulture class. They’d get dirty, they said. Montanez, obviously accustomed to this predilection for cleanliness, acquiesced. “So squat,” he said with a shrug.

However, don’t write that off as a feminine vanity. Over at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights, just north of downtown Los Angeles, a group of teacher Joe Mushinski’s best students--all wearing jeans and carrying plastic brushes in their back pockets--were standing around the courtyard they’d landscaped. Sure, they liked this business of getting out and planting things, the boys agreed. It was good to be outside, doing things with their hands. Except you got so dirty, your hands were never the same--and if you had horticulture first or second period, well, for the rest of the day you might as well forget it.

Horticulture, Floriculture

No doubt about it, these are city kids. They’ll never be farmers--in fact you lose points by even suggesting it--but there’s more to agriculture than farming. Indeed, in statewide Future Farmers of America horticulture and floriculture competitions, students enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s agriculture program are proving they have an edge over students from California’s farm belt. That’s the San Joaquin Valley, where, in cities like Tulare, Fresno and Modesto, the FFA is usually the richest and most powerful club on campus and members have been known to buy a pig for a freshman project and end up with a small herd of cattle plus a new car by graduation.

You don’t run into that kind of success story in Los Angeles. Few of the local schools with an agriculture program have anything other than horticulture and floriculture classes. And it’s hard to parlay working in a flower shop or landscaping (at least at the

neighborhood level) into a small fortune.

Nevertheless, school district officials see the agriculture program offered in 28 of the city’s 49 high schools and 26 of its 75 junior highs as a vital and viable part of its curriculum.

Said Ted Hirayama, agricultural education specialist for the Los Angeles Unified School District: “The program works. It brings out something special in many students. Even though they’re growing up in urban areas, there are lots of students interested in plants and animals. They should be given a chance to pursue these interests.

“For some it leads to a career, for others it will be an avocational or recreational activity. But the important thing is that these vocational courses give students a chance to experience immediate success. The very nature of what’s involved in vocational agriculture makes them feel good about themselves and their community.

“In a few cases,” Hirayama said, “the program actually keeps kids in school. And in just about all cases, we see them graduate and head directly into a job or college.”

It came out of left field. Laura Barton, FFA president at Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, was talking about how nervous she was speaking in front of 750 people at last spring’s Los Angeles Beautiful banquet--she was the public speaking sweepstakes winner--when, as casually as she might discuss the idiosyncrasies of her seven sisters and two brothers, she added, “and it doesn’t matter that I’m deaf and hard of hearing.”

Laura, a 12th-grader specializing in floriculture, was named her chapter’s most active member--in a chapter filled with most-likely-to-succeed types. The membership of 77 is stacking up so many awards and achievements in FFA, Los Angeles Beautiful and other local competitions that chapter adviser Scott King has taken to referencing them on computer--easier, he said, for filling out college and scholarship applications.

King is real pushy about getting them to go on to college, said several of his students as they conducted a tour of the acre known as Senior Glade next to the ag bungalow. Of course, people also can read that as encouraging, they said, pointing out the various styles of landscaping they’d done along the path and how they use the Glade as a test area to see how plants look at different stages of development.

As they walked and talked, the five students--Laura and, all juniors, her sister Malinda, Greg Shapiro, Duane Smith, Erik Brannon--interrupted each other, eager to explain the horticulture and floriculture programs.

Laura, they said, was the big success story: no hearing in one ear, 15% in the other; a girl so shy in the ninth grade that learning about flowers seemed a natural refuge--until she decided to face to take the FFA’s public speaking training. Now she’s planning to attend Cal Poly Pomona.

Greg and Duane also knew what they wanted to do: probably go on to college--Cal Poly Pomona, King’s alma mater. But they also were thinking of opening a landscaping business. “Mr. King, he’s taught us management skills,” Smith began, as Shapiro explained how they already had done some landscaping, worked in a local nursery and done maintenance at the school during the summer.

The thing about horticulture and floriculture, Malinda Barton said, stopping by the sprinkler system which the horticulture class had installed, was that “you start out not knowing much, but with just a little effort, you get a lot of rewards.”

Later, King scoffed at the suggestion that the success of his students was a compliment to him. “Heck, if kids find something they really like, and someone takes an interest in them--they’ll excel.”

Agriculture teachers, mused Lincoln High’s Joe Mushinski (called Mush by his students), are a breed apart.

It’s the proximity that does it. For every minute an ag teacher spends lecturing in front of the blackboard, there are at least 20 minutes in the more casual, yet more intense situation of helping students make a corsage, lay cement, install a sprinkler system, plant a tree or create a landscape plan. There are visits to their homes or after-school jobs to supervise projects for the various Los Angeles Beautiful competitions.

Some teachers, like Mushinski, 35, hire students for private landscaping jobs and work along with them. San Fernando Junior High’s Montanez, 27, takes his best students on camping trips. Polytechnic’s King and Canoga Park High School’s Steve Pietrolungo, 30, see students during the holidays or summer, since livestock or landscaping projects don’t disappear when the last bell rings.

As a result, the ag teacher-student relationship is a curious combination of respect and out-and-out affection, discipline and relaxed banter. Perhaps most apparent is the trust.

What happens, said Banning High School’s Jim Gabriel, 36, is “we get to know students on a very human level. It just happens naturally that I learn that a student works late at night and that’s why he’s always tired in the morning. Or in the process of assembling a project, I find out that a student can’t read or is weak in mathematics skills.

“I teach a science class, too, and really, in straight academic subjects, you’re so limited. But in a vocational course, it kind of all comes together--the leadership, the reading skills, the ability to reason. It’s a unique situation. For us, it’s hard not to be aware of their problems--and why those problems exist.”

Unless you’re wearing your blue corduroy FFA jacket, which invites a certain amount of razzing, it’s OK to take horticulture or floriculture or own a cow. In fact, owning a steer has a certain glamour. Owning a pig, less so. You spend a lot of time defending your pig against the misinformed who don’t realize that swine probably are the cleanest and smartest of all livestock.

However, you let yourself in for a lot of questions when you sign up for an ag class, agreed students at five schools. “Mostly, it’s the same questions,” said Canoga High’s Matt Dixon, a 10th-grader with a sly grin. “You know: how we got interested, what the classes are like. I think for our friends, if they haven’t taken these classes, it’s hard to imagine.”

Dixon and his buddy Edwin Calderon, also a 10th-grader, said they come from farming backgrounds. Calderon’s grandparents in Ecuador lived on a ranch, while Dixon’s family kept horses in Woodland Hills. Both boys own steers and swine which they keep in the small livestock area at Canoga High.

Robin Russell, also a Canoga High 10th-grader, was grooming her steer, Oreo, as she explained how she decided in junior high that working with animals was “what I wanted to do.” She shopped for a high school with a good ag program and last year bought and raised a pig which, like all the animals in Pietrolungo’s livestock class, eventually was sold. Farming is not in Robin’s family, she said, laughing at the thought. Her mother is a cartoonist and her father works for the Department of Water and Power. They were surprised at her interest, she said, but supportive.

The lure of floriculture, agreed the girls in Gabriel’s class at Banning High, was that it was fun. Pure and simple. But now, here was Laura Salas, a senior, committed to doing the flowers for a wedding later this spring. And all of the girls had been hired to do corsages and headpieces for parties, proms and Latino coming-of-age parties, said Sandra Andrade, a junior.

“People see our work, then they want us to make them something,” Andrade said, twisting wire to make a carnation corsage. “I figure I’ll get a job in a flower shop. Or maybe even own one.”

The boys in Mushinski’s horticulture classes, hoes and pruners in hand, found it easier to talk about what they’d done--building a patio barbecue, installing sprinklers, learning how to wire, moving a waterfall, rebedding the formal gardens that were part of the high school’s original landscape--than to explain why they’d done it.

At first, the reasons were vague, an almost embarrassed admission that “I just got interested.” Several of the boys said they’d signed up for Mushinski’s after-school class, offered through the Regional Occupation Center, or the summer program, which is sponsored by the East Los Angeles Skill Center. They’d wanted jobs and this paid (minimum wage) in addition to giving them job training. Besides, said Boni Bonitas, 17, “there’s nothing to do at home.”

Miguel Burgos, a junior, said the summer program induced him and his brother, Ricardo, a ninth-grader, to sign up for the school year, “because we knew the teacher.”

Peter Hernandez, an 11th-grader, said he’d been taking Mushinski’s class for three years and now was thinking about studying for an ornamental landscape career at one of the Cal Poly campuses--”a big step for me,” he said shyly.

“I like being outside, doing things with my hands. But what I really like is this feeling that I participated in keeping the school clean and looking good. Others think Lincoln is just their school, but I can feel good about it because I participated to make it special.”