On Tuesday, as most of their peers were enjoying the waning remainder of their summer breaks, several groups of young people were sitting in classrooms, as math teachers and professors showed them the fundamentals and formulae of the math skills they will need in eighth grade during the Bruce Woolpert Algebra Academy.
The program was launched in 2010 at Graniterock in Watsonville.
It was the brainchild of then CEO Bruce Woolpert, an education advocate who wanted to give young people a head start on the math skills they need to enter the workforce.
Woolpert died in 2012 in a boating accident. But the academy has thrived growing from a few dozen Pajaro Valley Unified School District students taking classes at Graniterock to 130 students in four locations.
This year, Taylor Farms in Salinas joined Joby Aviation and Driscolls in hosting Algebra Academy students.
Woolpert’s wife Rose Ann Woolpert said that an end-goal of the program is to both bolster the technical skills of young people and to encourage them to stay in their hometown to work for local, homegrown businesses.
“We have people that are coming back to work for us, and that’s a big part of it,” she said.
That includes Driscoll’s, Joby Aviation and Taylor Farms.
Those companies, she said, are “looking for people that are smart, and want to work.”
“We want our best and brightest to stay right here and work in our businesses and continue to make our communities vibrant,” she said. “That was Bruce’s philosophy.”
Academy instructor Hongde Hu, who teaches at CSU Monterey Bay, said he designed the program to bring students up to speed with standards recently adapted by the California Department of Education that mandates preparation in algebra.
Bruce Woolpert told The Pajaronian in 2011 that he sat in on one of Hu’s remedial math classes at CSUMB, and liked his teaching style that stressed short sessions of theory, followed by long practice sessions where the students put the lessons to use, with the help of the professors.
Students are recommended to the program by teachers and counselors.
Camila Zepeda, 13, said she was excited about the field trips to Taylor Farms and Joby Aviation. All three of her siblings also participated in the academy.
I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” she said.
Mateo Lopez, 13, said his love of math drew him to the weeklong program.
“I kinda like math,” he said. “I like solving problems, and I thought it would propel me into eighth grade.”
