Her father switched from teaching middle-school Spanish to running a fish store in the Portland suburb of Clackamas, where her mother had a business producing couture dresses.
Founded in 2001 by two graduate students from the Colorado School of Mines, Oberon aims to address the fish-feed problem by serving farmed fish the bacteria used to eat up the excess food in wastewater streams of food-processing plants.
And he found that he could cut the dropout rate dramatically by doing away with homework and incorporating income-generating activities such as fish cultivation and livestock rearing in the school curriculum.