"These are jobs where you can earn a real livable wage, $70,000 a year, and we couldn't fill them," she said. "There was such a shortage that one contractor was stealing away workers from the other."

She took the issue to her fellow grand jury members. They decided to investigate. Dozens of people, from welders to educators, were called to testify. They told the grand jury about a gaping hole in the middle of Fresno's economy -- one that Fresno Unified wasn't addressing.

We had reached deep into the rural heart of Mexico and pulled out a poor, uneducated work force for our farm fields, they said. These hard-working people held firm to the lowest rungs of our economic ladder. Understandably, their children didn't want to follow the parents into the fields.

But what choices were the school district and the city giving them? So many of the middle rungs of the ladder -- the industrial jobs that boosted Los Angeles, for instance -- were missing here. So the children were being asked to leap from the bottom of the ladder to the top in one generation.

The school district wasn't being honest about the students it was serving, the grand jury found. It was asking them to make a leap, from Third World illiteracy to college, that many found extraordinarily difficult.

"When you're dealing with students that you know aren't interested in attending a university or college, you have to have another option, another way," La Follette said. "I don't blame it all on the district because a lot of this is handed down from the state. But the school district needs to think creatively."

The limited vocational education offered by Fresno Unified had created a self-justification. Fresno lacked the skilled work force needed to attract outside industries with good-paying jobs. And the lack of those industries had hardened the school district into a single belief: Prepare the kids for college.

Grand jury members heard about one blue-collar job in Fresno that had attracted more than 100 applicants. Half of them couldn't fill out the application properly, and the other half couldn't pass the drug test.

Three years ago, partly in response to the grand jury's report, Fresno Unified Superintendent Michael Hanson launched a commission on work force readiness and career technical education made up of business and industry leaders.

The commissioners went straight to work, devoting more than 1,000 hours to finding ways to turn potential dropouts into career-ready graduates. In May 2009, they delivered a report to the school board, underscoring 25 recommendations and citing Duncan Poly High School and the Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) as models. Both programs were combining academic rigor with technical rigor, offering students a way to pursue college or a job or both.

Fresno Unified needed to broaden this approach, the report said, implementing career technical education concepts as early as the fifth grade and offering more counselors at every level to help students with "Individual Career Plans."

"This is not one of those efforts that ended in a report that got thrown on the shelf," said Tracewell Hanrahan, the district administrator who led the commission and now heads the Fresno Housing Authority. "We've reported to the board three times. Several of the recommendations have been implemented."

Fresno Unified has set up a career technical education center at Edison High, she said, and renovated the counseling center at Bullard High. And in response to a shortage of counselors, the district has added positions throughout the district.