How does a teacher get high-school students to show up early and wait at the door, eager for class to begin? This is how.
“It all started in this room,” says Galen Hartman, 57, a veteran collision body-shop owner turned high-school teacher. We’re in his auto shop on a campus of the Sacramento Academic and Vocational Academy (SAVA) charter school, and Hartman’s nine teenage students have gathered in a semicircle. Behind him is a candy-apple-red 1964 Chevy Impala, with its engine, other guts, and most of its interior removed. Hartman is explaining why this Impala is special.
“The vision came from your mom,” he proclaims, pointing at Nayeli Rodriguez, a 14-year-old freshman from a well-known lowriding family in town.
A year ago, Rodriguez’s mother, ShaVolla, was in the classroom and had the idea for the shop students build a lowrider. And not just any lowrider. Kids need to learn skills for tomorrow’s workforce. So why not build an electric lowrider? One with all the traditional lowrider features—a car that can hydraulically hop and ride on three wheels, with custom art all over it. Only no combustion chambers and no gears. A lowrider with a fully electric powertrain
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