Food program helps low-income families of local high school
The average household income at Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit High School is about half of the median in San Jose
Life was already hectic enough for Leonela Villalobos before the pandemic.
Every day at 4 a.m., the 17-yearold would wake up and get ready to make the long drive with her parents from their home in Los Banos to San Jose. She would arrive at Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit High School on East Santa Clara Street at 7:30 a.m. before the doors even opened as her mom — who worked at a factory in Fremont — and her dad — a construction worker — went on to their jobs.
After school, she worked retail at Eastridge Mall before heading home with her parents. The days dragged together with the repetition of long drives, classes, work and school assignments, but it was manageable.
Then the pandemic cost Leonela’s mom her income — and finances tightened fast.
“Having my mom lose her job because of COVID made me feel like I had to pick up more — I started picking up more shifts, more hours,” Leonela said. “It’s really like, OK, I’m going to get home at ten and just stay up till I finish my homework.”
For many families at Cristo Rey, an experience like Leonela’s
is the norm, said Aurora Aceves, the school’s director of counseling. The nonprofit Jesuit school was founded in 2014 to serve about 450 low-income Bay Area students, many of whom hail from East San Jose, along with further-f lung cities like Morgan Hill, East Palo Alto, Hollister and Los Banos. Families contribute to the school on a sliding scale, paying a maximum of just $2,500 per year and often much less.
The average schoolwide family income was just $54,000 before the pandemic, compared to San Jose’s median household income of about $104,000. Now many are barely surviving on just one income — often minimum wage — after the pandemic triggered widespread job losses.
With more than 70% of students eligible for free- or reduced-lunch, the threat of hunger among students deepened by the day.
“The need that arose from the pandemic was even higher than even I thought, being a school serving a community that’s underserved,” said Adolfo Guevara, assistant principal of student life and dean of students. “This really brought it to light. There’s a big number of our families that are struggling to put food on the table.”
So Aceves, Guevara and a group of other Cristo Rey leaders quickly came up with a plan: A weekly food drive to feed families. Drawing on friendships, relationships with local food pantries, and their own pockets — and a benevolent anonymous donor — they pulled together a smorgasbord of food and supplies within weeks.
Every Tuesday, families arrived at Cristo Rey to pick up rice, beans, pasta, onions, potatoes, peanut butter, fresh fruit, vegetables and sometimes chicken — all loaded up into their car trunks by socially distanced volunteers. Now, the school is seeking $20,000 from Wish Book to purchase food in bulk, aiming to keep the food drive alive as the effects of the pandemic linger.
“We see it in the faces of the families we serve every week. There were so many times when I used to put the boxes in the trunk, and you’d see the kids peeking out of the back, like, ‘Mom, we got the chicken’ — just the continued gratefulness from them,” Aceves said.
As word of the program spread, one in four families ultimately began using the food drive to help money stretch further — including Leonela and her parents. On more than a dozen Tuesdays over the past six months, Leonela and her mom drove out to San Jose, waving hello to the many familiar faces and anticipating what the week’s box had to offer, a package often filled with other essentials like detergent and toothpaste.
The food drive even has helped her family form healthier eating habits, she said, after years of relying on late-night fast food returning from Los Banos to the Bay Area.
“My parents and I obviously need it, but my friend who has five siblings — of course, they need it,” Leonela said of the food drive. “Everything’s gotten so much more expensive. And they don’t just give you the same thing every week, they want you to feel like you’re going to the supermarket.”
Without having to worry so much about the daily necessities, Leonela began focusing more on the future — especially college applications for next year. Leonela’s parents emigrated from Michoacán, Mexico, and she’ll be the first in her family to go to college. Her dream school is the University of California at Berkeley, where she wants to study political science and perhaps eventually become a public defender, representing racial minorities and, as Leonela puts it, “the politically voiceless.”
She’s already partly there. Earlier in high school, she hosted a workshop on immigrant rights for other Cristo Rey families and became familiar with the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco during a school summer session. Leonela also interned at the County of Santa Clara and works remotely at a technology company called Servicenow thanks to Cristo Rey’s work study program — experiences that have given her confidence as she prepares for the next steps.
But to focus on classes, remote work and the final touches on her college applications, Leonela needs to have the necessities covered.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Leonela said, “if you don’t have the money for it, where you stand on the hierarchy — you should have access to basic things.”