On Saturdays at Rancho Cucamonga High School, the indoor-outdoor campus can feel like a community carnival.
Last week, at 7:30 a.m., teams of spandex-clad flaggers and flaggers warmed up for a competition on any available patch of concrete. Preparations were beginning for a black cultural celebration.
And on a lower level, in a classroom surrounded by a “Money for College” meeting and a study session for AP Chinese students, a group of teenagers filled out tax returns for anyone who had heard of their clinic. free.
Three generations of the same family came, having heard about the clinic through the fourth, the great-grandmother. They brought in a new dependent: a 2-month-old baby. A boy in a Spider-Man suit watched Spider-Man videos while his grandparents received help. Two retirees also registered, one a Harley enthusiast and another who arrived on a fancy electric bike.
That anyone trusts high school students to prepare their statements is the work of a little-known service called VITA, which stands for Voluntary Income Tax Assistance. It is an Internal Revenue Service program that trains people to help their neighbors with the annual task.
To participate, students must follow a sort of Income Tax 101 curriculum and then take tests drawn from Form 6744. (The IRS has a form or publication for basically everything.)
At Rancho, as everyone calls the school, students work under the tutelage of Chris Van Duin, who has taught accounting there for 22 years. Every January, he starts showing up on Saturdays just after dawn with breakfast burritos for his students.
The day I was there, soft jazz was playing. On his desk, one screen showed information about the clinic's clients while another had the Manchester United-Fulham soccer match on mute. His cell phone rang from time to time, because the clinic's clients have his personal number.
The students arrived little by little. Calob Chávez, 17, wants to be an investment banker. Destiny Linda, 17, hopes to one day earn a doctorate in business. Many of them now look over their parents' shoulders to make sure they file their tax returns on time and get all the deductions.
You can't predict who might show up on a given Saturday. An identity theft victim was trying to use a special PIN to file your taxes. Someone else was doing their taxes for the first time in seven years. He was sitting with seven neat stacks of papers in front of him. It looked like he owed more than $10,000.
“I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy,” said Nicholas Rosales, a 16-year-old student who took his first accounting class a year ago and is now Mr. Van Duin's teaching assistant.
Every tax return tells a story. Where you live? What do you do for a living? What kind of income does that generate? Who are you raising, housing and helping, and how?
Reading even one statement (let alone the 250 or so that Rancho students got last year) is something of an object lesson in personal finance. Ask the right questions of the person behind the numbers and you can learn a lot about how the world works and the ways to make your way in it.
When I first met with the students, they were perplexed because someone was scheduled to come the next day. He had five jobs in 2023. “How do people balance so many?” -Nicolas asked.
On Saturday morning, Abigail Jiménez, 27, showed up and explained. She had started the year as a manager of a beauty salon supply store. After a brief stint as a part-time receptionist, a hair supply store competitor offered her a job and she accepted.
Then, he decided to change careers. Around the same time, she and her boyfriend moved and she accepted a new job at a leasing company. Finally, when her professional interests focused on numbers, she found work at an accounting firm, although they did not file returns until later in the year, including those of her employees.
He wanted his refund, if any, as soon as possible, so he came to the clinic.
By 10 a.m., there were so many customers that there were no students left to help them. Groups huddled around computer screens, entering basic information into TaxSlayer, a software program. The guy with the seven statements was still there, entering and leaving the room from time to time to talk on the phone.
Would you like to comment? “Hoooooo,” she said, tilting her head back before refusing to say anything else.
Work ends every Saturday at noon. In class, students finish statements they did not complete during rush hours on Saturday.
This year, Nicolás did his own taxes for the first time. “I work at Taco Bell,” he said. “I received a refund of $8. “It's $8 with which I can buy more candy.”
But those refunds can increase over time if you know what to look for. “There are people who don't have that knowledge,” Destiny said. “They miss a lot of opportunities.”
