A Central Valley high school’s career training program gives students a ‘head start’ on their futures

For nearly a decade, a Central Valley high school’s career training program has allowed incoming freshmen to pick a career track and commit to pursuing it for the next four years. 

The program is advertised as a chance for students to get a “head start” on their futures, according to a brochure shared by Carmen Garvis, who leads Sanger High School’s popular Career Technical Education Program, often referred to as the “Pathways Program.” 

Garvis wrote that the program has steadily grown since its inception in 2014. She estimates that more than one in three students at Sanger High School opt to participate in the program compared to the state average of one in five students, according to a UC Davis study. 

By allowing students to explore a career sector of interest before they enter college, Garvis wrote, the program helps students save time and money. Plus, the technical pathway classes are often dual-enrollment through local community college courses — meaning most program graduates are ahead of their peers if they decide to attend college. 

The school offers nine pathways, Garvis said, and students are expected to commit to them. They include advanced placement capstone, digital arts & media, education, health sciences, military & public service, engineering technology, biomedical science, agriculture mechanics, and plant science. 

Pathways students at Sanger High are encouraged to take a variety of classes including sector-related courses, AP courses, and college courses, on top of core “A-G courses,” or classes needed for entry to California’s state colleges and universities, according to Garvis.

JCal News asked three alums of Sanger High’s career training program to discuss their experience in the program.

Liliana Nuñez, who graduated from the school’s education pathway in 2022, generally described her experience in the program as “beneficial,”  but noted some aspects of the program weren’t as directly helpful. For one, she decided mid-way through high school that she wanted to work as a neonatal intensive care unit nurse, not as a teacher. However, she stuck with education and did not consider switching to the nursing pathway. 

After graduating from Sanger High, Nuñez attended one semester of college at Fresno State, about 16 miles away. However, she struggled with the transition from high school to college and stopped mid-way through her freshman year.

She said that she now works from home  — doing eyebrows and making handcrafted roses — and is mainly focusing on raising her 9-month-old daughter. She hopes to soon become a part-time teacher for an afterschool program and eventually return to college. 

Nuñez doesn’t regret participating in the Pathways program. The dual-enrollment courses she took were valuable. Some of the skills she gained have carried over to parenting.

“I learned about child development that helped me with my child of my own, as well as how to deal with child behavior,” she wrote. 

According to Garvis, one purpose of the program is to help students “further learn about their sector of interest and decide whether this is the career path they want to pursue after graduation.” 

Asked to respond to students’ concerns that the program did not fully prepare them for college, Garvis wrote that partaking in the Pathways Program is optional. 

“Students have the flexibility to request exiting from the programs at the end of any school year, especially if they decide they are no longer interested in the career sector they chose as incoming 9th graders,” Garvis wrote. 

Pathways alumna Liliana Torres, who also graduated from Sanger High School in 2022, is currently entering her third year at Fresno State. Torres completed the engineering pathway and says she enjoyed being able to take college courses for credit in high school after choosing the engineering field in eighth grade. She is majoring in mechanical engineering and also works part-time as a student assistant at a daycare at Fresno State.

“I believe the engineering pathway benefitted me in the long run,” Torres said, “It allowed me to have a first look into the engineering industry.”

One downside of being in the program, she said, was that there were some classes she was interested in but couldn’t take due to scheduling conflicts with pathway classes. 

Pathways alumni Eddie Portillo, who also completed the engineering pathway and is now entering his third year studying engineering at Fresno State, found his experience in the program to be positive. The classes he took during high school introduced him to the concept-based classes he took in his sophomore year of college, he wrote.

For Portillo, the transition from high school to college was at times challenging.

“I did have a tough time adjusting after high school because of how inconsistent the workload might be from semester to semester in college,” Portillo said. “Although the [engineering] pathway prepared me for higher engineering classes, not all classes are engineering-based when starting college … It can be difficult to have beginning general education classes with higher-difficulty classes at the same time.”  

Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, whose district encompasses Sanger, said he has “worked closely” with local school districts to secure funding for Career Technical Education, including a $2.4 million grant for Clovis Unified; a $3.6 million grant for Fresno Unified; and a $3.7 million grant for the Fresno County Office of Education. Valley Regional Occupational Program also received a $3.7 million grant, some of which may go toward Sanger High School’s pathways program. 

“I oftentimes am thinking about how we create pathways towards careers that you might not be exposed to,” Arambula said. “We have to create opportunities and pathways for people to see themselves in positions that they wouldn’t even dream of, and that exposure allows them to then pursue that dream.”

Arambula said while pathway programs like Sanger High School’s have “tremendous advantages,” students should ideally be able to move or migrate in the midst of the program.

“We should give people the freedom to be able to define what it is that they like, and for them to be able to change their mind as they’re going through that process,” said Arambula, who himself worked as a physician for 10 years before transitioning to politics.