A bountiful harvest
Student-run festival continues to expand its appeal
CALIPATRIA — Calipatria High School’s Fall Harvest Festival was created five years ago as a simple fundraising project that has grown into a popular family event.
Held Saturday night at the CHS campus, this year’s festival included a barbecue beef dinner, a costume contest, 16 interactive games, a cake walk, face painting and a “ghost hunt” tractor ride.
“We’re trying to get young kids involved here in the Calipat and Niland area, and have a good fun place for the families to come and enjoy,” the festival’s creator and CHS agriculture teacher Briana Larios said. “With the distance that we are away from all the other bigger cities, it’s a lot easier for our community to come to a smaller festival that’s a little bit closer and more economically involved for them.”
During its inaugural year, the festival consisted of only a barbecue dinner and about five interactive games.
“We really went out this year to try to get a lot of people involved,” Larios said. “Usually, we just kind of had a petting zoo and a couple of small games, and that was about it.”
While Larios was the mastermind behind its creation, the festival itself is completely run by CHS students. A total of 70 student volunteers worked to make Saturday’s festival a success.
Proceeds from the event go to benefit Calipatria FFA.
“We breed a lot of our own animals at the farm, so we take the funds from that to help the kids actually have animal feed money for the animals because we finance all of their projects for the fair,” Larios said. “All of their animals out here are financed and raised and bred by the students. So the money basically just keeps coming back into our program and helps promote student growth.”
CHS sophomore and Calipatria FFA officer Isaac Islas said he enjoyed that the festival also offers younger students a chance to see what the high school has to offer.
“We want to be united,” Islas said. “We want the community to be more involved with us. Other schools, like El Centro or Brawley, do sometimes have festivals, but this festival is from our high school. We want to make sure that the middle-schoolers or the Fremont (Elementary) students feel welcomed and that high school is going to be a fun place.”
CHS also hosts a Spring Festival annually and plans to host a Christmas Festival in December for the first time.
“We’re doing better than past years,” Larios said. “We’re building every single year. It’s definitely a work in progress. Our Spring Festival, we actually had about 300 people show up, so we’re hoping to kind of keep growing off of our Spring Festival.”