Class of 2006

Cesar Chavez High 2006 graduate Pearl Pagarigan recently visited Delano and took some time to walk the campus where she stopped to talk to a few teachers.  Pagarigan was the first Valedictorian who was part of the Sophomore class that opened Cesar Chavez High School in the fall of 2003.  We asked her to catch us up on what she is doing today and how Cesar Chavez High School influenced her life and career.

She currently resides in Philadelphia and works in the US Operations for an international social enterprise called One Acre Fund, serving smallholder farmers in East Africa and South Asia where she has travelled to for her occupation.  “It's very fulfilling work, and my connection to our work is definitely inspired by my own family history and the history of agriculture in Delano.  It's crazy how full circle things like that tend to be,” says Pagarigan.  She also spent a couple of years in Seoul, South Korea where she met her husband, Dustin, while they were both Native English teachers. 

Walking around campus she states she has “such positive memories of her time in CCHS,” and adds “if I look back on what was most impactful for me in HS for building confidence in my abilities, it was really the extracurricular activities CCHS offered--ASB, Yearbook, etc.”  In high school, she held the positions of Rallies and Activities Commissioner, Yearbook Editor, and United Filipino Organization officer amongst other things. 

Part of her duties now is to create marketing materials where the skills she learned in yearbook has come in handy.  In addition, Excel is one of the programs that she uses every day at work and says “the opportunity to learn typing, Word, and Excel in high school has been beneficial both in college and now.”

Before leaving campus, she wanted to make sure to say “If I haven’t said it before, thank you teachers and staff!”

Class of 2006: Janno Rojas, Ashley Isidro, Pearl Pagarigan, Chris Nelmida, & Alyssa Isidro

September 2019