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Due to the economic budget cuts in local and state educational funding during past years, the Vallejo City Unified School District cut off funding for the farm. Upon hearing this, a group of teachers, civic persons and students began a dialogue with the school district to seek ways to keep this county wide educational asset operating. Money was raised from the community and given to the school district for the school year 2003. Further school board cuts necessitated that stand-alone fund raising and management be implemented to keep Loma Vista Farm on a continuing basis; thus the birth of the group, Friends of Loma Vista Farm. Loma Vista Farm serves over 18,000 students annually in the form of class trip visits/field trips as well as community drop-in visits by individual families. The farm houses and cares for approximately 100 critters, including species of horse, pony, donkey, cow, goats, sheep, pigs, geese, ducks, chickens, peacocks, rabbits, cats, guineas and assorted water and land turtles and displays of bugs. All of this is contained on five acres of land, in pens and pasture, barns and a 2500 square foot greenhouse and garden center.
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The Early Concept of Creating An Education Based Farm as a Center of Learning!
How it all began!
Sometime in 1973 or 1974, many ideas and thoughts were surfacing with school employees at Loma Vista Elementary School. The area surrounding the farm was challenged with social and economical concerns that made the neighborhood and surrounding area around Loma Vista Elementary school a topic of discussion for the thriving community. When the farm idea was floated through the ether Carolyn Libby was likely in her third year of teaching at Loma Vista Elementary School. Every weekend the school was broken into, and sometimes during the week as well. The troubled community around the Loma Vista School was very much a dangerous territory and the houses were in poor and broken shapes. Carolyn Libby remembers going to her principal, Bill (can't remember his last name) and said, "Wouldn't it be a great idea to have a farm at the school?" His reply was to hand me a grant application that he had just received for Title 4C grants from the federal government.
That year the Federal Government was looking for reading and math improvement and since California schools were already testing every year using standardized testing. It was a fairly simple idea, to match Loma Vista with a school across town that had a similar population. Doing this created the experimental and control groups needed to measure success or lack of success with an idea for the Farm. At the end of the 3 year period, look at the scores, and measure results. It was lots more complicated to write the grant application and Carolyn Libby had help from other faculty members at Loma Vista, but she poured my heart into it.
Joy and celebrations followed the announcement that the grant application was successful. Per Carolyn Libby, "When we received word of the award I went into every classroom and we "dreamed" what a farm should have in and on it. Every kid participated in the dreaming of the place".
The next Fall construction of Loma Vista Farm began. Fences were erected and trenches dug for the utilities on site, and the trenches were closed by little kids using little tools. The garden was planted and as students and teachers alike stood back; the weeds nearly overwhelmed them. The idea attracted other people from Vallejo City Unified School District and the Community, Alice, Tom (Tom Arcadi), and Rebecca being 3 notable examples. Over the next three years the farm took shape.
As the grant came to a close a statistician was sent from Stanford who ran the numbers from the test scores and compared them to those from the school across town. She (the statistician) nearly fell off her chair!! There was significance at the .05 level, way more than anyone ever suspected. As it turned out, every child at the school got 1/2 hour a week of time on the farm. Carolyn Libby would pick them up at the classroom and deliver them back. What the teacher did in the classroom to extend their experience varied and certainly must have contributed to their new connection with Earth and nature. At the same time, Loma Vista Elementary school wasn't vandalized anymore, and the Farm was never vandalized. The community took charge of itself and cleaned itself up, painted, grew gardens, and listened to their roots.
Carolyn Libby once remembers a middle school boy who said to her, "we dreamed a Farm and it came to be. Dreams can come true." It was an important tenet of the Farm from the very beginning that it belonged to the community.
Still today, actually even more so with the non-profit Friends of Loma Vista Farm, the Farm belongs to the community. Through the years Loma Vista Farm's reach has extended from South Bay to far North Bay, and from the San Francisco peninsula to far East Bay almost to Sacramento. Carolyn Libby expressed satisfaction recently, May 2008, "And now you folks have taken it over and I am so impressed!"
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The History Of Loma Vista Farm
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Vallejo Times Herald, June 2000/2001
"This farm has been so good for so many kids. They come and they volunteer, and spend time here in the summer," Reed said. "A lot of kids, while their parents are both off working are better off here."
Reed has seen students at the school come and go for 19 years. Reed said even when she visits the local grocery store, she'll bump into former students who will yell out "hey, it's Farmer Cindy!"
"They do come back and see me and I see them all around town, all over the place, and they always recognize me. But when they're working at the checking stand, it kind of gives you an odd feeling of old age creeping up on ya," Reed chuckled.
Reed began as a parent volunteer when her daughter attended Loma Vista Elementary School. She now serves as the farm's peer educator. She is the school veterinarian who gives shots and shears sheep. Along the say, she teaches kids about how to care for animals. Reed said kids often avoid getting into trouble by channeling their energy into helping maintain the farm or participating in one of the many club activities.
Each farmer expressed contentment and fulfillment with their busy day jobs. When asked where they saw themselves 10 years from now, LeRoy said "still at the farm" and Arcadi said "probably retired farming somewhere."
After a brief pause, Reed laughed. "Where do I expect to be in 10 years? Maybe buried under that willow tree over there. I love the farm. It's the only place I ever want to be."
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Farmer Cindy finds sanctuary at Loma Vista, by Richard Freedman
Cindy Reed would be the first to admit some of her children have big ears. A few have rotten teeth. Others smell. Oh, do they smell.
But, after 20 years, Reed loves them all.
Yep, it's been two decades since the woman who turns 50 on July 4 first walked into her nirvana, a home away from home where everybody-and every duck-knows her name.
"I pretty much knew the minute I was asked to come here that this was it," Reed said. "I knew this is where I was going to be and this is where I was going to stay."
Reed took a break last week from hoisting heavy bags of chicken feed to talk about her life on the troubled farm. Because Loma Vista falls under the school district's budgetary knife and is set for slaughter by summer.
Reed was traumatized when she heard the news.
It's totally heartwarming to see the community get involved and care so much," she said. "It kind of mends your heart and puts it back together and gives you hope. That's where we are now: Hopeville."
Reed said she wouldn't know what to do if she was no longer wanted or needed at the farm, where she figured she's seen about 750,000 young students stroll through in her 20 years here.
"This is where I belong," said Reed, Loma Vista's special education/para-educator. "This is where we all want to stay. We're working as hard as we can to do whatever we can to be self-sufficient. We'll see where we go from here."
Though Rees is seemingly surrogate mother, veterinarian, psychologist and friend to the many animals, it wasn't as though she was raised on a farm during her childhood in New Hampshire and, later, in Paso Robles.
"I did have a constant love of animals growing," she said. "I would bring home any stray, anything that looked like it needed help. My mom would say, "She's going to do something with animals. Just don't bring home a horse."
Reed was only 14 when she met her future husband, then 17 -year-old Richard Reed.
Reed laughed.
Reed stopped the interview to check on Gene Lois Silverman, a mama goat who was snuggling with her triplets. A peacock walked by. A rooster crowed. A boy walks by clutching a patient duck.
"Everybody seems to love this place," Reed said. "It's a safe place. When parents and little children walk into these gates, they can leave the cares of the world behind. It's a whole different world here. Everyone feels safe and loved. This is really a place full of love. It really is."
And a place that is an escape for Reed, who maintains her unbridled enthusiasm through her job faces extinction.
The best days at Loma Vista, said Reed, are when a baby animal is born "and we've had quite a few of those."
"Losing an animal or hen a child you know dies, those are the lows," Reed said. "Or when the school board decides you no longer need to exist."
As much as Reed loves the animals- "I have conversations with them all the time" - she adores all the children who have paraded through Loma Vista in the last 20 years.
"Most of them call me 'Farmer Cindy,'" she said. "Some say 'Hey lady!' But most say 'Farmer Cindy.'"
"The kids would say, "What are they doing? They're fighting! And I tell them, "No, they're just playing,'" Reed said. "Some of the older children ask questions, but I tell them to go ask their moms or teachers. They do seem to know what's going on. If they're old enough, I'll say, 'You know, it's part of life.'"
Reed said she tries to answer questions "honestly and hopefully, correctly. We do get a zillion and one question."
"I hope and pray the farm will be saved," she said. "We can still learn a lot from nature and the animals. We haven't totally killed the environment."
Reed's life, with the exception of her husband and two daughters, is Loma Vista Farm.
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From a pamphlet Carolyn Libby wrote in 1978: " The Loma Vista Farm/Garden Center began in the spring of 1974 with a small garden planted by students and staff.
The following fall a Title IV-C grant was awarded to the district to research the effect of farming on the academic achievement of primary grade students."
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From the Vallejo-Times Herald July 25, 1976:
"A pilot program that began here two years ago on a vacant lot filled with litter, tin cans and broken glass has been developed into a thriving school-community project that offers youngsters a wide variety of teaching and learning opportunities."
"In charge of the unique venture is Caroline Libbly, who serves as the only salaried teacher for the project. It is funded $32,000 annually by the federal government in Title IV money provided through the State of California for research projects to improve education."
"Ms. Libby and several other teachers at the nearby Loma Vista School started the project in 1974 as a place where stuents could experience a real farm."
"We put our heads together to get our project funded and I wrote the grant proposal. It finally was approved and we began developing the site-a garbage-strewn, weed-filled parcel of land adjacent to the Loma Vista School."
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June 12, 1982 Vallejo Independent Press: Carolyn Libby is saying good bye to Vallejo today.
A teacher with the Vallejo Unified School District for 11 years, the last eight directly involved with Loma Vista's Farm-Garden Center, ...."
"Carolyn and the other teachers working with her applied for a grant to fund the farm in 1973. She found she was putting a personal dream into writing."
"I poured my guts out in the application. I guess my approach was a bit unusual, but we got the grant."
"Carolyn continued using her teaching skills, but found after the grant had been approved that she became a general contractor arranging for electricity, sewer line, gas and water for 3 acres of land behind Loma Vista School that had served as an unofficial dump."
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Founded in 1974