![]() Over the past five years, the boomerangs have launched all sorts of initiatives to stop the brain drain out of the Valley. “I want my students to come back to Stockton from college and have someplace fun to go,” says Piasecki, who teaches at Stockton Collegiate International School. One of the boomerangs, chemistry teacher Brandon Piasecki (Mississippi ’11), even helped open Stockton’s first craft brew pub on a corner in a downtown that used to die at 5:00 p.m. As an example, Tubbs has committed to making Stockton the proving ground for the first public-private initiative to provide poor families with a universal basic income (the term used by the initiative’s Silicon Valley backers to describe a guaranteed monthly payment). They’ve embraced a culture of experimentation that springs from impatience with hand-me-down policies and innovations first tested in places like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and also from having nowhere to go but up. Members of this group have gained a foothold on the school board and captured the city’s highest office: 27-year-old former Stockton teacher Michael Tubbs is the youngest mayor of any sizable city in the U.S. This applies in particular to the “boomerangs.” That’s what locals call a group of highly educated, history-minded millennials who defied a lifetime of warnings from their parents and everyone else, and who returned after college to Stockton to make their stand in the place that raised them. “But the people who produced those resources have been neglected.” Howard adds, “What’s happening in the Valley right now is that people are done with that.” ![]() “This valley has grown up serving everybody else, feeding the rest of California and the country,” says Nik Howard (Greater Philadelphia ’03), the executive director of Teach For America’s California Capital Valley region. ![]() Only a quarter leave high school with sufficient credits to be admitted to a four-year California public university. Some 85 percent of students in Stockton’s school district fall into categories of high risk related to income, language needs, or unstable homes. About 80 miles east of San Francisco, the inland port city of Stockton, with 300,000 residents, sits surrounded by arguably the richest soil in the U.S.
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