High School Graduates Attending College

Introduction

California Governor Gray Davis announced a "Buy California" program on June 1 2001. (Raines 213)The goal of the $5 million program is to persuade consumers to buy commodities grown in the state as part of an effort to speed up economic and job growth in the Central Valley. Buy California was announced in Bakersfield in June 2001 at the second Central Valley Economic Summit, which brought together local, state and federal officials to discuss the chronic double-digit unemployment rate in the Central Valley.

The commodities with the lowest prices include grapes, processing tomatoes, and apricots. Many farmers, including the 400-acre Be Wise Ranch near San Diego that was featured as the wave of the future in 1997, are looking at the third straight year of low prices and losses.

California's unemployment rate in May 2001 was 4.9 percent; the national rate was 4.4 percent. However, unemployment rates in the San Joaquin Valley remained high, in the 14 to 18 percent range, for example, 13 percent in Fresno county. UpRight Inc, a maker of aerial platforms with 800 employees and the largest private employer in Selma, which has a 22 percent unemployment rate, closed its doors and declared bankruptcy in June 2001.

Education- getting more children to graduate from high school and go to college- is widely considered to be the key to raising earnings and reducing unemployment and poverty in the San Joaquin Valley.

Tulare County

Tulare County, with 368,000 residents and a labor force of 150,000, has traditionally had the highest unemployment rate in the San Joaquin Valley, 13 to 20 percent; the rate was 14.1 percent in June 2001. Tulare county's largest city, Visalia, had 91,565 residents, according to the 2000 census.

The city of Lindsay exemplifies Tulare county's economic woes. A 36-acre food processing plant owned by Lindsay Olive Growers was closed and was to be reopened by Console Foods, a frozen-food processor, but Console Foods defaulted on a federally guaranteed $7.9 million loan, which made it hard for Console to secure financing to reopen the plant. Lindsay Mayor Valeriano Saucedo was appointed to the Tulare County Superior Court in May 2001. From 1985 to 1993, Saucedo was the statewide director for California Rural Legal Assistance.

LoBue Brothers Inc, the largest independent commercial citrus packer in California, reopened a closed 200,000 square foot Dole citrus packing shed in Exeter in May 2001, creating about 20 jobs.

Fresno. An economic summit on the future of Fresno concluded that the county has "one of the worst combinations: high joblessness, shallow income growth and a big wave of population growth." Fresno County residents received $139 million in unemployment benefits in 2000; however, Fresno does not always have the qualified labor to staff jobs that require education and skills, discouraging some new investment. The city of Fresno wants to be designated a federal "empowerment zone," which would mean tax breaks for investors who create jobs in the city.

A grand jury recommended that the city of Parlier, population 11,000, disband its police force and contract ...