The Orange County Register, March 7th, 2007
There’s an expression to describe cowboy poseurs: “All hat, no cattle.” They’ve got the twang down, but nothing else.
Flip it around and get Kim Miller’s students at Mission Viejo High. On a farm tucked at the north end of campus, 100 yards from the San Diego (I-5) Freeway, suburban kids in hip sneakers and furry designer boots meet before dawn and on weekends to shovel manure.
Don’t even think about putting a cowboy hat over the faux-hawk hairdos they spend so much time styling. They’re not that kind of farmer.
“You have the punk kids and the rap kids, and they’re cleaning up poop together all day,” says Courtney Carpi, a senior. “I’m really into the diversity. I’ve really learned not to judge people at this farm.”
The no-hat aesthetic is key. If the Future Farmers of America club at MVHS were limited to future farmers of America, it would still be a few dozen kids in the corner of campus. Actually, it might not be anything – the farm would likely have been bulldozed, turned into parking lots or a new baseball field, like a lot of the county’s farmland.
When Miller came here in 2001, she knew it was risky. She knew the farm was in bad shape, and it was quite possibly worth a lot more as land for development than as a little-used class farm.
But she took the chance. She may have saved the farm, and she most certainly saved kids like Todd Bush.
• • •
How does a girl growing up in an Orange County tract home, her family three generations removed from agriculture, fall in love with a farm?
Like many Orange County dreams, it started at Disneyland.
Miller was 5 when she moved to Fullerton, and her parents promised the trip to the amusement park to make the move less scary. She saw the horses walking down Main Street, pulling carriages.
After that she loved horses. She drew pictures of herself as a grownup, in which she was a teacher, wearing a red dress and riding a horse.
She grew up in Fullerton in the 1980s, when it wasn’t uncommon to have neighbors with farmland. She visited one nearby family often and helped feed their goats and chickens.
She studied agricultural sciences in college, then taught on the farm at Sunny Hills High. In 2001, she took a job at Mission Viejo High. The school had only one agriculture course. Few of the 84 students who took the Ag-1 classes wanted to be there.
The farm itself was a stinking mess, and spectators at the nearby baseball field complained.
Miller wasn’t sure the farm, and the job, would even be there for long. She sought assurances from administrators that it wouldn’t be paved over. But once satisfied that the administration would support her, Miller decided the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Where else in Orange County could somebody get her own farm to run? Where else could she have dozens of lambs, an acre of crops, a llama to scare off dogs?
She set out to turn Ag-1 into a four-year academy.
• • •
“My mom says you’re sick,” junior Kaitlin Graham tells Miller one day.
For Valentine’s Day, Miller was inspired: She brought in 20 pig hearts and had the students dissect them. There were plenty of “You’re breaking my heart” jokes.
“If I didn’t dissect hearts on Valentine’s Day, I wouldn’t be me,” Miller tells Graham.
When Miller arrived in 2001, she brought in her own no-hat style. She peppers her speech with slang like “fer shizzle” and “fo’ sho.” The kids like it, she says. (The kids actually roll their eyes quite a bit. She also says “okilydokily” a lot.)
The kids definitely do like her, though. They say they go to her for help in other subjects because she won’t think they’re nerds. Left unsaid is that she’s kind of a nerd.
“I mean, look at her right now. She’s singing like a hick,” says senior K.C. Park, motioning toward Miller on the other side of the classroom. He adds that she’s “spontaneous, enthusiastic, good-looking.”
To protect the program, Miller grew it like a prize tomato. The FFA club throws monthly socials – last month, they had an after-school assembly on reptiles attended by more than 100 students – and Miller tries to spread the word that agriculture is for everybody. One out of five jobs, she says constantly, is connected to agriculture.
Now 280 students are studying in the agricultural sciences academy. The school hired a second teacher, Darryll Ruffolo. Miller works an extra period just to make sure there are enough courses for everybody.
She has since won just about every state award possible, including Vocational Agriculture Teacher of the Year from the California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom.
Among the 280 are kids like Park. He’s all style: Converse All-Stars, a strip of bleached hair gelled into a perfect wave, fake diamond earrings.
“You know, when I think of farmers, I think of, like, out West, with, like, corncob pipes and whittling and stuff,” he says. “You meet people who are into it, and they’re like normal people. Who would have thought?”
One out of five jobs or not, the truth is that Park probably won’t be a farmer, or anything like a farmer. But the academy is so popular, students will stretch to connect it to their futures.
“I mean, I’m going to be a (fashion) designer,” he says. “Maybe it will help me when I’m buying materials and stuff.”
• • •
In 2002, Todd Bush was a skateboarding freshman who “never got higher than a C,” he says. He only took Miller’s class because he liked animals.
What hooked Bush, Miller says, was cash. He raised a pig that won awards at the county fair, sold it and pocketed a few hundred bucks in profit.
Two years later, he was working at school voluntarily on a Saturday morning. Miller asked him to escort a visitor from the farm to the parking lot. He was asked if he liked school.
“No,” he said. “I’m here for the teacher. She’s like the only reason I come to school at all.”
“To tell you the truth,” he says now, “I liked high school – I liked my friends. But every class but hers I dreaded.”
He had Miller’s class first period and last period. So he stayed for the full day. “It worked out pretty nice. If I just had her in the mornings, I’d go and I’d probably ditch the rest of the classes.”
He took every class she offered. He’d sit in class, thinking to himself: I’m taking floral design? Really? But he never got lower than a B in a Miller course.
“I don’t think I would have graduated (otherwise). I’d probably be trying to get my GED right now,” he said.
But he did graduate. He’s now in college, studying culinary arts.
“It was a risk,” Miller says. “His classroom management skills weren’t good. But he was all about responsible for that pig. We take a chance on a lot of kids. What if you don’t take a chance on a kid who may have become the U.S. secretary of agriculture, because he didn’t do well in that classroom?
“No, you’ve got to take those chances.”
