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Education has always been part of Veronica Ulloa’s DNA.

Her parents were teachers, and each day as a child, she would take the 20-minute ride from her hometown of Tehama, California, to Gerber School, a K-through-8 school in the next town over where they taught.

“ I grew up in school,” Veronica says. When I was really young, my mom would bring me to her classroom, and she taught sixth grade when I was really, really little. And so I think just going and experiencing school, and I was so curious on what everybody was doing, and I was able to read books from the school library at a really, really young age, you know, and my dad, and when he taught special education, I was in his classroom all the time too.

“I was exposed to a lot of different things, very young. And I think that really helped me to be more curious.”

Once high school began, the drive for education remained.

Instead of going to the high school nearest Tehama, she headed 30 minutes north to the larger Red Bluff High School, which offered more programs and opportunities. After graduation, she continued to hit the road — this time, commuting each day to California State University, Chico, better known as Chico State. The university had as many students as the entire population of Red Bluff.

“ When I came to Chico State – like on the first day of school, my first class was a lecture in a huge lecture hall with a bunch of people. That was really, really different for me because I've never not met the teacher on the first day.

“And then that's where you just walk in, you listen to your lecture and you leave, you know? And so, it was a lot different for me. …

“I went from knowing everybody in Red Bluff to not knowing anybody in any of my classes at Chico State. And it was kind of isolating because I didn't know anybody. And I was also a commuter student from Tehama. So that totally changed my experience in my first year because I lived in Tehama and I didn't get to experience a lot of the things that students living on campus did.

“I just felt kind of removed because I was from such a small area, and I didn't have these experiences with huge schools like other people might have.”

But the disruption did not stop her. After a month, she joined the North State Student Ambassadors, a student-led group on campus that mentors other students — especially those from rural areas like Veronica — and helps them adapt to life at a campus with almost 15,000 students. Since joining the group, she has become a leader, on campus and among her fellow education students, one just a couple of years away from leading a classroom in the rural schools of northern California.

On the road

Tehama, California, population 435, has a small tic-tac-toe board of streets with only a post office and a museum. For just about everything else, residents have to drive past fields and orchards of nut trees.

When Veronica Ulloa was growing up, she was one of the few young children in town. Once she started school, she headed up the road to Gerber School, where her parents taught, a place that served as a connecting point for rural areas around Gerber. Classes tended to be larger than those at other elementary schools, with 30 to 35 students filling the seats.

“Gerber School is like a really big asset to the community, I think, because almost every kid went there,” Veronica says.

“Gerber School would host a bunch of events like the Halloween carnival, or they'd have like spaghetti dinners and stuff like that because there were like so many kids and so many families that Gerber School served. And it was like a community center almost in Gerber because Gerber is kind of like a bigger Tehama that doesn't have a lot of things.

“I was at school all the time, hanging out at school all the time with my friends and with my parents. But even though the class sizes were big, the teachers really cared. And it wasn't a negative. I mean, sometimes it would be a little difficult, but overall, it was not a negative that the classes were so big because it served such a huge area.”

Her positive experiences in the classroom did not end at Gerber. After eighth grade, she chose to attend Red Bluff High School, a half-hour’s drive away from home in a town of about 14,500 people. Despite its size and large classes, she still felt a connection to her teachers and fellow students.

She remembers being in biology class her junior year with a young, energetic teacher named Annie Bamford who brought science to life for students and encouraged them to pursue their questions.

“She made the class so fun, and I was like I want to do this because I'm having so much fun in this class, and I wanna be able to give a whole class of students the same feeling that I'm feeling right now,” Veronica recalls.

In Ms. Bamford’s class, Veronica never felt lost inside the classroom. She asked questions and offered answers — even if her answer wasn’t always the right one.

“Her teaching made me have fun learning, which is really what I want to do, too, in my classroom.

“And I also never felt dumb in her classroom because I've had experiences like that before where I just don't — I feel like I don't know anything. And even in college, the classes where I am not afraid to get the answer wrong — those are the classes that are my favorite.

“And in her class, I was not afraid to get the answer wrong.”

The leap to college

College meant another drive and another adjustment for Veronica. Chico State is about 30 miles south of Tehama on State Highway 99, a worrisome two-lane road that parents often warn their kids about.

Sometimes along the way, a fire station would catch her eye, and for some reason, it would remind her of her longer journey.

“Sometimes, I would be driving to school and then I would just be really thankful that I was going to Chico State because Chico State was the only school I applied to,” Veronica says.

“I've been wanting to go to Chico State since I was in like seventh or eighth grade because both my parents went to Chico State, and we would come walk around it all the time. And in seventh grade, I went to this thing at Chico State called STEM Girl Mayhem, where you could sign up as a seventh- through ninth- grade girl. And you would go and you would walk around all of the science parts of Chico State, and we got to do a bunch of activities. I was, like, forget high school. I just wanna go straight to college because I love Chico State so much.

“And so sometimes on my drive I would think about like, wow, this is really what I've been wanting to do, and I'm so happy that I'm getting to do this.”

On campus, though, there would be moments of isolation. Some fellow students weren’t familiar with the small gathering points north of Chico State like Tehama. And the university’s student population was larger than all of Red Bluff, where Veronica went to high school. But then, she joined the North State Student Ambassadors at Chico State, a relatively new program to support rural students from Northern California.

One of the first exercises they did: reviewing the positives of their local communities. It gave her a new appreciation of her rural roots.

“When I got into the North State Student Ambassadors, one of the things that we did when I started out was asset mapping your community,” Veronica remembers.

“So pulling out all of the positive things or all of the good things about your community. And I think that really, changed my outlook on my community. And I also saw that there were some needs in my community that maybe I could help with.”

Becoming a rural educator

In her degree program, she has begun conducting undergraduate research to explore the belongingness of queer individuals in rural communities. How do marginalized people feel in their rural areas? Earlier this year, she was asked to speak to Rural Schools Collaborative at their annual Hub Summit. Chico State, along with North State Together, serves as a co-anchor for RSC’s Northern California Hub.

This year, she also spoke to a group of younger students at an Association of California School Administrators conference about her experiences growing up in a rural community.

“ I thought it was really special to talk to them because I had a negative outlook growing up in a rural area,” Veronica says. “But now I'm really thankful for it.

“And I know most of them probably weren't paying attention because I was talking during lunch, but a lot of the administrators came up to me after and were, like, that was really impactful to hear. The big point I made was that growing up in a rural area is not a negative and having this network of people behind you growing up is going to really impact you.”

At Chico State, she is focusing on liberal studies to be able to teach across the curriculum in elementary school, perhaps fourth grade. She has plans to return to the fields and orchards of northern California, perhaps to Gerber School. Once she obtains her bachelor’s degree in 2027, she will apply to the credential program and begin her student teaching.

“My mom taught fourth grade for a while and my uncle also taught fourth grade for a while, and I just remember having a lot of fun in the fourth grade, and I think it's still young enough to not be like a middle schooler,” Veronica says. “You know, how middle schoolers are. I've also helped out in fourth-grade classrooms before and I really liked it, but I would honestly be happy anywhere.

“I'd be happy in any grade, just, you know, being a teacher and giving back the way that the teachers impacted me — that's all I want to do.”

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