Richmond High prepares students for future in engineering

There’s some good news in the latest figures from the Labor Department – they show that jobless claims have gone down. But the bad news is that analysts say this decrease isn’t quite enough to show a healthy job market just yet. The national unemployment rate is at 9.2%, and in California, it’s at 12.3%. So, with so many people still looking for work, it’s hard to imagine that by 2018, we might have a labor shortage. That’s because the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be a million new jobs by then, but experts say there won’t be enough people trained and ready to fill those positions.

What are the fastest growing jobs? Most of them are in – surprise, surprise – the sciences. Bay Area schools are scrambling to add the science, math, and engineering courses that will keep their students competitive, and they aren’t waiting for the funding to trickle down. Richmond High School got a little corporate help to make a brand new engineering lab. Reporter Lillian Mongeau takes us there.

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LILLIAN MONGEAU: As computer skills become a necessity for even blue-collar jobs, more middle and high schools across the state are adding high tech curriculums to their current offerings. It’s great for teens who want to be engineers, but these classes aren’t just for the college-bound. The software kids learn in some classes is so complex that knowing how to use it could land some a job right out of high school.

AURELIO GARCIA: There you go, make sure that line is parallel to that one. Okay, you’re good…

Aurelio Garcia is a math teacher at Richmond High School. He’s also one of the school’s two engineering instructors. In a long, white-washed classroom with rows of Dell computers, 23 sophomores are clicking on 3-D images of train engines – they look kind of like colorful Monopoly pieces. Garcia is teaching these students to use the same design software professional architects and engineers use to build their models.

GARCIA: This kind of program is standard. And I think it’s great that they’re exposed to it at an early age and in high school. They’ll have an understanding that other students might not have, so they do have an advantage.

To gain that advantage, students learn to manipulate formulas and input measurements to create 3-D images of, well, anything.

MARIA CASTILLO: It’s really fun. You could build to a soda can of coke, and maybe a train. Even … even a phone you could build too.

That’s Maria Castillo. She’s one of the only girls in the room. She says she doesn’t know why other girls aren’t in the class; she just likes to build stuff. Castillo and her classmates aren’t building real trains or phones, but the computer images they’re creating are embedded with all the data a manufacturer would need to produce the real thing. It’s clear this connection to the real world motivates a lot of the kids in the class. Rigoberto Huerta is nearly done with his model of a train engine.

RIGOBERTO HUERTA: I got interested in this class because my family really likes to work on cars and like, build them. My cousin used to help me work on his car. And I used to help him build the engine, build the tires, build the rims and stuff so that got me interested in this.

Huerta says he’d like a job using this kind of software to design cars one day. To do that, he says, he’d need to figure out…

HUERTA: …how fast  the aerodynamics would make it. How it would look, how would like it feel in the driver’s seat and stuff like that.

MONGEAU: What are some of the calculations you had to make to figure this out?

HUERTA: Like how big the circle had to be, how long, how tall, how wide. And how deep do the rails have to be so the train can fit on it.

The screen Huerta is looking at is sort of one big graph. There’s an x-axis, a y-axis, and, with a click of a button, there’s a z-axis too! This makes everything appear in 3-D. If you’re not a math person it can be a little overwhelming. But here’s the weird thing – even though Huerta and Castillo and all the other kids in the room are working with geometry theories and algebraic equations.

MONGEAU: Nobody has mentioned math.

GARCIA: (laughs) Well, I think that’s the key. Math tends to scare a lot of students.

That’s Mr. Garcia, the math teacher.

GARCIA: What this does is they do math all the time without realizing it and it’s helping them develop skills in class and I see it in their geometry classes and algebra classes.

Like schools across the state, Richmond High is facing huge budget cuts. So the funding source for this brand new $60,000 lab was not the school district. It was oil giant Chevron, which has a large refinery in the city. Chevron Spokesman Brent Tippen says the company is committed to making Richmond a better place to live. But the city has sued Chevron, citing environmental concerns over its plans to expand its operations. There was also a dispute recently over how much tax money the company owes the city.

MONGEAU: Chevron’s had a lot of negative press here in Richmond. Some people would say this is just a PR move. What would you say to that?

BRENT TIPPEN: Well, I think, you know, Chevron is directly invested in the Richmond community. It’s always our hope that at some point by educating the students in technical jobs that we’re able at some point to employ those students and to keep them right here in California.

Richmond isn’t the only town in California receiving support. In addition to funding programs at seven other Bay Area schools, Chevron also funds projects in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Bakersfield. With state education dollars slipping away, arrangements that allow private companies to pay for public school programs are becoming more common. But Richmond students aren’t particularly concerned with who is footing the bill. For student Maria Castillo the class has opened the door to a new career path.

CASTILLO: My plan is to go either to UC Berkeley or UC Davis and study as an engineer. 

Castillo sees her success in this class as one more indication that…

CASTILLO: Just because we’re from Richmond doesn’t mean we can’t do it, we can still do it. It doesn’t matter where we live. We can just still do it if we put our effort into it.   

Whether they stay and work for Chevron or not, these students in Richmond's engineering academy will be one step ahead in California's increasingly high tech economy.

In Richmond, I’m Lillian Mongeau for Crosscurrents.

Lillian Mongeau is a reporter with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.