A high school classroom near 13th and I Streets in Reedley is where students spend their days stripping down wrecked cars, mixing Bondo, and learning to wield sanders and fiberglass tools instead of textbooks. The classroom is a short walk from Raymond Arteaga’s auto body business. The program, run by Valley ROP, drew roughly 140 applications for just 28 available spots in its first class, and organizers say it is the Central Valley's first high school auto body and paint program built specifically around collision repair.
Reedley shop owner Raymond Arteaga offered a free custom paint job, according to Mid Valley Times. Valley ROP launched a small after-school class with just six students, according to the same report. What began as a twice-weekly after-school activity has now grown into a five-day-a-week course for the 2026-2027 school year, serving more than two dozen students pulled from 14 high schools across the region, including five continuation schools, as reported by ABC30 Fresno.
Because the program only has room for 28 students, Valley ROP prioritized enrolling seniors first given the limited capacity, per ABC30's report. Students get to class either by bus from their home campuses or by driving themselves, and once inside the shop near 13th and I Streets, they work through workstations, tool cabinets, and actual vehicles brought in for repair. Instruction starts with basic auto body fundamentals before building toward more advanced techniques.
A Working Shop as a Classroom
Arteaga's business, Darkside Kustomz in Reedley, is a short walk from the classroom. The classroom has workstations, tool cabinets, and vehicles in a professional-shop-like setting, according to ABC30. He said the setup lets students work on actual wrecked vehicles with far more room to maneuver than a typical classroom would allow, per ABC30's coverage. Students are taught to disassemble cars entirely and then work with the materials and tools of the trade, including Bondo, fiberglass, and sandpaper, Arteaga said.
“The trades are still coming back,” Arteaga said, according to ABC30, arguing that skills like his were becoming a lost art before programs like this one began restoring them. He added that the program's success will ultimately depend on continued collaboration between schools and industry, a sentiment echoed by Valley ROP Superintendent Fabrizio Lofaro, who said the course is designed to create a direct pathway into Fresno City College's automotive collision repair program and into careers in auto repair.
Grand Opening Planned
A grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony was scheduled.
Valley ROP itself is a creature of regional cooperation, established in 1971 under a Joint Powers Agreement and operating as an independent career technical education school district under the Fresno County Office of Education. It serves seven member districts — Cutler-Orosi, Dinuba, Kings Canyon, Kingsburg Joint Union High, Parlier, Sanger, and Selma — reaching more than 6,300 students in the 2018–2019 school year, according to Valley ROP.
A National Shortage Behind the Local Push
The timing lines up with a documented national labor gap. A 2026 report from the TechForce Foundation found that collision repair training programs nationwide meet only 42% of annual workforce demand, with the industry projecting a need for 73,354 new entry-level technicians between 2025 and 2029, as detailed by Repairer Driven News. Collision repair recorded the highest turnover rate among the ten technical fields TechForce studied. Across those sectors, the foundation estimates the shortage of skilled technicians costs the country roughly $7.42 billion in lost wage-based economic output every year, with annual job openings outpacing postsecondary graduates by more than 140,000 positions nationwide.
Students who complete the Reedley program have a clear next step waiting nearby. Fresno City College offers Associate in Science degrees and certificates in Automotive Collision Repair Technology through its Advanced Transportation Center, with coursework covering frame alignment, plastic panel repair, structural welding, and paint refinishing. For a 17-year-old learning to mix Bondo in a Reedley shop today, that campus represents the next rung on a ladder that, three years ago, didn't exist at all.
