Yosemite High Teacher Leads by Following his Students

By Luciana Chavez

Yosemite High School history and digital media teacher Jeff Rivero makes it his business to know his students’ passions. They’re the springboard for showing his continuation school students how to turn passion into action.

“These students who’ve been told ‘You’ll never be able to do that’ feel so empowered,” Rivero said. “It wakes them up.”

For his work motivating students to advocate for the all-girls’ Daraja Academy in Kenya, Rivero was one of five international educators—from India, Tunisia, Guatemala, Lebanon and the U.S.—to receive the 2025 World of Difference Award (Educator Category) from The International Alliance for Women last September.

Daraja Academy is a continuing passion project for Rivero’s students. Current classes are working on a documentary about the all-girl secondary school.

They also often share their work inspired by issues the girls and the academy face at different professional conferences. When a group of Yosemite High boys made a presentation a few years ago, an attendee asked why teenage boys were so interested in women’s empowerment.

“Their answer was incredible,” Rivero said. “They said, ‘We all have single moms.’”

Rivero, an Atwater High and Merced College alumnus, shows students how to find inspiration wherever they are. He shows them how to approach life like he does.

Honors and Accolades

Rivero’s work, with his student-first approach, has been recognized for years. The TIAW nod is the latest Rivero has earned while inspiring students towards social justice and environmental advocacy work.

Rivero also won the Educator of the Year award from the California Environmental Education Foundation in 2025. In 2022, he was honored with the U.S. Green Building Council’s K–12 Educator Award. In 2016, he received the national Presidential Innovation Award for Environmental Education, recognizing his curriculum pairing access to natural resources and global conflict.

Rivero has long contributed to the California Environmental Literacy Initiative, which makes accessible quality environment-based learning, to all TK-12 students in California. He also mentors young people in the California Youth Climate Policy Leadership Program to make them knowledgeable advocates for sustainability policy.

Yosemite High also features an after-school group known as the Interact Junior Ambassadors (IJA), where Rivero mentors students to do deeper research into societal problems using science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) principles.

“I have to give credit to the great teachers I had at both Merced College and Stanislaus State,” Rivero said. “They all inspired me in this direction. And I have such great parents. Without them, none of this work would have been possible.”

Connections and Collaborations

Rivero became interested in Daraja’s story when his IJA partner Chuma Ikenze introduced him to Daraja Academy founder Jason Doherty around 2018.

The secondary boarding school uses education to break the cycle of gender bias that denies girls a high school education due to arranged marriages, teen pregnancy and poverty.

Inspired by what they learn about social justice and environmental sustainability, the Yosemite High students have initiated projects like recycling lithium batteries and producing the school’s first yearbook. They also worked with Merced’s Sunrise Rotary Club to sponsor a $15,000 scholarship to give one current Daraja student a high school education.

Rivero connects with everyone he can to promote his students’ work.

After being named a UN Ambassador for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals program in 2019, he started the “17 and Me Show” on YouTube. There, he and students have produced discussions with the likes of civil rights icon and United Farm Workers co-founder Delores Huerta and Xploration Nature Knows Best star and host Danni Washington, a leading clean oceans and climate activist.

He and his Yosemite High students have also met world leaders during visits to the White House and sports legends like former San Francisco Giants manager Dusty Baker and NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice.

“Jerry politely asked me what I do, and we spoke for 30 minutes,” Rivero said. “I showcase my students to everyone I meet. And I have Yosemite High principals and a superintendent who support what we do.”

The Yosemite High connection to Daraja will get stronger in the next year or two. Rivero’s digital media and history classes are producing a documentary, featuring their Sunrise Rotary scholarship recipient, to show how Daraja changes lives for girls in Africa. Yosemite students are currently working to raise $12,000 to purchase portable video equipment and pay for travel to Kenya.

They’re also researching and developing content and questions for the Daraja student, her classmates, alumni and employees. Professional cinematographer Seth Hancock, the documentary filmmaker behind the Hulu film “Leftovers,” is coaching the students on making a documentary and will consult on the project.

Subverting Expectations

Rivero happily accepts that his teaching approach is a bit of reverse engineering.

“I cannot tell you how much I have learned from my students by helping them in this backward way,” he said. “And I have seen my students take ownership of whatever activity we’re doing and then tear it up.”

Consider the exchange he had with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) administrator at the QS EduData Conference in San Francisco in 2023 after being imipressed by the Yosemite High presentation.

She said, “I can’t believe your high school students are doing things I can’t get my college kids to do!”

Rivero replied, “Not too bad for a bunch of continuation students, right?!”

Her jaw dropped to the floor. She had no idea.

Rivero has taught at Yosemite High for 30 years. Do not suggest retirement to him.

“I feel like I’m in my prime right now,” he said.

Rivero enjoys subverting expectations of strangers, potential collaborators and his students.

Like once in San Francisco, when a Yosemite student stopped cold in front of something he’d never seen before—an escalator—and refused to step on. Or at a hotel in Anaheim when another young person, who had never had hot, running water for bathing at home, took multiple 30-minute showers during the trip.

“We have to be mindful of their experience to reach them,” Rivero said. “But, after I told my students what that important woman from MIT said, well, it was hard to fit their heads in the car.”

Rivero has the daily honor of witnessing the growth of beautiful minds. His latest crop of students did a Zoom presentation for the National Green School Conference held in San Diego on Feb. 17.

It’s wonderful fuel for his own life.

“I always find myself bumping into people with dreams,” Rivero said. “I throw some gas on their fire, and then they throw some on mine.”