Tiny Academy Finds Big Picture in Nature

On the northwest corner of the sprawling North Hollywood High School campus, students are being encouraged to think naturally.

Shaded by trees and surrounded by legumes, buckwheat and cloves is the Naturalist Academy, a five-acre garden and farm area complete with a greenhouse and a classroom.

It’s a so-called “small learning community,” which funnels 100 recruited students through their high school years in the tradition of horticulturally minded great thinkers. The goal? To make them sensitive to nature while satisfying all the requirements for a high school diploma.

“We look at nature as your sort of guide to the big picture,” said Randy Vail, the teacher who started the academy at North Hollywood three years ago. “We teach that ecology is the economics of nature, and economics is the ecology of society.”

There are seven small learning communities at North Hollywood, with such themes as social justice and media. Also known as academies, the communities were created to ease the social and learning problems caused by overcrowding on the year-round campus and offer a strong academic focus.

A few other Los Angeles Unified School District campuses are trying such small learning communities, but none has gotten as far as North Hollywood in practical details and philosophy.

While the school’s well-known highly gifted and biological science magnets draw students from all over the district, the academies take students only from North Hollywood’s feeder zone. Each academy enrolls 100 to 400 students, who are segregated into their communities with a few exceptions for gym and Advanced Placement classes. The idea is to have the group of students and teachers go through the four-year high school experience together.

At the Naturalist Academy, the faculty hopes that graduates lead environmentally responsible lives. Teachers are assigned to teach traditional subjects such as math, English and science, weaving an environmental theme into the subject matter.

For example, students write poetry under the trees in the garden for English class. In history, students learn how the Mayans may have depleted their natural resources.

Students in health class once had to collect their daily garbage in a plastic bag and carry it around campus to illustrate how much trash a person created in a day.

Vail, who holds a bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine and did graduate work at UCLA, teaches horticulture, health and Advanced Placement classes in history and human geography. Three other teachers are assigned to teach English, science and math to the 100 “Naturalists.”

Perhaps the most unusual part of the Naturalist Academy is the students’ hands-on work. They are just as likely to carry a pitchfork as a pen. They water plants, rake leaves, hack weeds and plant seeds. But it’s not to be confused with agricultural education, which has a mandated curriculum.

“These kids aren’t going to be farmers,” Vail said. “It’s not like I’m trying to teach organic farming so that they’ll become organic farmers. But maybe they’ll grow up buying organic products.”

And if a student questions the combining of intellectualism and agriculture, Vail throws out a few famous examples: Edward O. Wilson, John Muir, Charles Darwin and Voltaire.

A self-described “militant environmentalist,” Vail is just as much the attraction as the work itself, his students say. He can be abrasive, sarcastic and supportive at the same time.

“I’m raking to get on his [good] side,” said ninth-grader Ryan Avila, pushing leaves into a pile recently during health class.

Vail’s classroom is decorated with photos of Kurt Vonnegut, Dennis Hopper and Cesar Chavez. Bumper stickers reading “Question Authority” and “Hug a Farmer” are plastered on his desk front. A life-size wooden statue of Nelson Mandela holding up his fist occupies one corner.

Vail, who used to teach in the campus highly gifted magnet, decided to begin the Naturalist Academy because he wanted to help kids who had hidden potential, he said. Before each school year, he scours for possible Naturalists by looking at students with high Stanford 9 test scores who are not in an honors or gifted program. He calls them “previously unidentified gifted kids.”

“You don’t have to be extraordinarily smart,” said ninth-grader and Naturalist Ben Ruano. “You just have to want to learn.”

North Hollywood Principal John Hyland said he instituted the program for the academies three years ago as a way to make young people feel less anonymous on the 4,000-student campus. “We want them to feel part of a community,” he said.

Hyland said he was inspired by the success of similar academies that began sprouting up in overcrowded high schools in New York City in the mid-1990s.

In addition to the Naturalist Academy, North Hollywood has the Entertainment and Media Academy, which sends students to work with screenwriters at Universal Studios, and the Bilingual Teacher Training Academy, which allows students to work in elementary schools to get a feel for a career in teaching. The school’s other academies include Social Justice, Transportation Careers, Translation and Interpretation and the Globe Academy for ESL students.

“My dream is that the whole high school will [be composed] of autonomous units with their own budgets that will be able to stand on their own two feet,” Hyland said.

Megan Rosner, the Naturalist Academy’s English teacher, described her students as a “family.” She left Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles two years ago and chose the Naturalist Academy partly because she said wanted to work with Vail.

“This a pure, positive thing,” she said. “A lot of education is stuck on testing. But there is so much more to develop in students.... The emphasis on the environment is important because it’s about living.”

Diana Aguilar, an 11th-grader in Rosner’s class, said the academy would help her prepare for college because it offered several AP courses. It’s also not as intense as the highly gifted magnet program.

“You’re not characterized as a nerd,” she said.

Inna Bergal, who is in the same class, said she turned down the highly gifted magnet to join the Naturalist Academy because she liked the students and teachers. It also taught her to be more environmentally sensitive.

“Before this, I couldn’t care less about recycling,” she said.