Summer Harvest: The time is ripe for reaching migrant students
By:
Carol Brydolf
Published: September 1, 2011
It’s June 19. Summer doesn’t officially start for two more days. But on this sunny Monday morning the Fresno County Office of Education headquarters is abuzz with activity.
Three of the region’s largest summer migrant education programs launch today, so teachers, tutors and administrators are scrambling to manage the details of a raft of federally funded services that will reach between 8,000 and 10,000 local migrant children in the coming months.
“Logistically this massive summer mobilization is a bit of a nightmare,” says Ruben Castillo, senior director of California’s Region IV Migrant Education Program. “I actually like the chaos,” he adds cheerfully. “It means things are happening.”
Castillo has spent most of the morning on campus at California State University, Fresno, overseeing the first day of the region’s Migrant Scholars Program. The federally funded effort buses more than 200 middle- and high school students from eight local school districts to the college campus for two weeks of math and language arts instruction, physical and nutritional education, and creative activities.
In addition to all that, Migrant Scholars strenuously encourages migrant students to begin planning now for college. Bringing them to local state and community colleges—either for two-week sessions or daylong field trips—gets students comfortable navigating the wonders of a modern college campus.
It’s especially crucial that these students see themselves as bound for college, advocates say, because so many of the messages they’ve received thus far about their chances of succeeding in school have been discouraging.
Migrant students routinely score below their classmates on statewide standards tests and are less likely to pass the California High School Exit Exam or take the a-g classes required for admission to state colleges or university; they drop out at higher rates and are more likely to suffer from untreated health problems serious enough to keep them out of school.
Migrant students are more likely to be older than their classmates when they enroll in kindergarten and less prepared for the academic and social demands of the increasingly rigorous studies that follow. They’re apt to be poor, speak a native language other than English, and live in linguistically isolated communities where little English is spoken by adults. (Most of California’s migrants speak Spanish as their first language, although many speak regional dialects that are quite different but sometimes mixed with Spanish, or even indigenous languages that predate European contact; California schools also serve significant numbers of migrant Hmong and Punjabi students.) Migrant experts in Arizona who recently conducted a national study of seasonal agricultural workers concluded that migrant students and their parents are the “most undereducated major subgroup in the country.”
Tutors, health-care workers and other aid
The federally funded Migrant Education Programs are out to change all that. Back at Fresno’s COE offices, Ground Zero for Region IV, the largest of California’s 23 MEP regions, local college students—who are themselves children of migrant workers—have gathered for last-minute training while program director Castillo was overseeing the morning bus runs on the state university campus. Between 60 and 70 of these college-age “Mini-Corps” tutors will work in Region IV programs this summer, helping elementary and secondary school students with math and English, supervising students at the region’s summer science camp or conducting home visits to connect with migrant families for one-on-one work with students.
Down the hall, Region IV staff is unpacking several pallet-loads of books for the Reading Is Fundamental Program. Spanish-speaking staff members will deliver the books and other learning materials to about 8,000 students and supervise their independent study. The region operates kindergarten transition programs, a summer science camp, English-immersion academies and parent education classes to acquaint families with the school system, sound nutritional practices and other critical life skills.
Although they are not in the office on this particular morning, a registered nurse, a nurse practitioner, and health aides and educators also work for Region IV. They will staff about three dozen sites via a mobile clinic to work with summer school students, in addition to visiting schools throughout the region during the regular school year.
Region IV receives $12 million a year in federal migrant funds, funneled through the state MEP—and in many cases through Region IV to individual districts. Castillo and his staff have also forged collaborative relationships with migrant-student service experts at Fresno State and with a host of community-based health and social services organizations.
It’s a sad irony: Although California’s ongoing budget crisis has all but eliminated summer school for students who rely on state-funded programs, many migrant students—in some ways the most underserved of California’s students—have access to a rich menu of federally funded summer programs.
Students ‘like a mist’
In many MEP regions in California—depending on local crops and agricultural calendars—summer is often the best time to reach migrant students. That’s because so many of these students who are on the move during the school year will stay put in one place during the summer and fall harvests. This allows intensive, focused summer programs to help students compensate for interrupted schooling during the regular academic year.
“When you have the chance to pack a year’s worth of learning into a summer session, you’ve got to make the most of the opportunity,” says Kate Snow, who operates a volunteer after-school tutoring program for about 30 migrant children in Region II. Snow and 10 bilingual college and high school tutors work with children who live in the Madison migrant housing project in Yolo County. The Madison housing complex is one of three in the county available to migrant workers during the March-October harvest season.
“The children I see here during the summer are happy, confident and curious,” says Snow.
“I get the feeling that during the regular school year, things are different,” she adds. “They face discrimination from mainstream students and from other Spanish-speaking students. They are like a mist that blows in during spring and evaporates in the fall. They desperately need support and a connection with someone who believes in them.”
California’s efforts to address the unmet needs of migrant students are further hampered by insufficient data. Nearly 200,000 students were identified this year as eligible for special services. But previous counts of California’s migrant student population have been as high as 300,000. Migrant education staff say it’s not clear whether there are fewer migrant families living here or if perhaps tighter federal regulations have made it more difficult for students to qualify for services.
‘Patchwork of services’
Whatever the explanation—or the exact number—California is home to more migrant students than any other. They attend school in 47 of its 58 counties, and the Golden State qualifies for the highest federal migrant grant in the nation—about $135 million.
California’s migrant service system has been evolving since 1965, when the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act required states to address the unique needs of migrant students for the first time and allocated money to provide special services. California’s MEP regions design their own services in accordance with general state and federal guidelines. Some districts, including San Jose Unified, Pajaro Valley Unified, Bakersfield City Elementary and Delano Joint Union High, are their own self-contained MEP regions. Many serve small numbers of students, but about half of California’s MEP regions supervise programs in multiple districts and counties.
The state’s largest regions, including the Central Valley’s Region IV and Region II, which stretches from the Sacramento area north to the Oregon border, are responsible for thousands of students. These regions reimburse districts for the costs of services to eligible students, and regional staffs also run their own programs. Region IV serves more than 20,000 migrant students between the ages of 3 and 21 who qualify for federally funded migrant education services because they have moved between school districts at least once in a three-year period so their parents can follow the harvests.
The California Department of Education established a number of groundbreaking statewide programs, including the Mini-Corps tutoring services and the Portable Assisted Study Sequence program, which supplements classroom instruction to help high school students accumulate credits toward graduation. Also noteworthy is the Binational Migrant Education Program that California pioneered, which brings teachers from Mexico to California school districts for six to eight weeks each summer. The program is aimed at providing support for the approximately 14,000 students who travel between California and Mexico each year; the Mexican teachers volunteer their time.
Over the last four decades, California has dramatically expanded the quality, intensity and variety of special programs for migrant students and their parents, although efforts to track students and measure the impact of these programs have lagged behind educational innovation. Migrant families by definition are always on the move; border enforcement policies, the weather, success or failure of various crops and the state economy have all impacted migration patterns. Each new population has unique educational needs.
Unlike the top-down standardization that’s characteristic of so many state and federal programs, states have considerable latitude in their migrant education services. This may all change with the reauthorization of the ESEA and as federal officials continue to tighten eligibility rules and demand more hard data about program results. But for the present, services vary widely, depending on local needs.
“It’s a real patchwork of services,” Snow, the volunteer migrant after-school program coordinator in Yolo County, says of the programs. “There are advantages to tailoring programs to local needs, but there’s also a benefit to having standardized programs that operate on a broader scale.”
Moving beyond ‘sink or swim’
Ernesto Ruiz knows from personal experience that services have improved since he was a migrant student in the Central Valley during the late 1960s. He helped his parents in the orchards and fields “as soon as I was old enough to carry a bucket,” he says, and found school to be a “sink or swim experience.” Migrant students who didn’t get special help generally dropped out.
With the help of his mother and several teachers, Ruiz made it to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was recruited to work as a Mini-Corps tutor. He went on to become California’s MEP director; now he runs the Mini-Corps program for the state. He believes the program has inspired a significant number of migrant students to become bilingual, bicultural teachers and administrators since it was first launched three decades ago.
“We’re doing a much better job reaching these children,” says Ruiz, “but is migrant student achievement where we’d like it to be? Of course not.”
Region II MEP Program Coordinator Karen Quintanilla has seen also a lot of changes during her 30 years working with migrant students—many for the better. “I used to have to talk classroom teachers into accepting the assistance of a bilingual tutor or aide, because no one wanted to allow another adult into their classroom,” she says. “Now they’d kill to have some help.”
It’s difficult to collect good achievement data about migrant students, Quintanilla continues, because the academic calendar is often out of synch with local agricultural cycles. Many migrant students miss state standardized testing dates because they are moving between schools or working.
Mary Kahn, English learner coordinator for the Davis Joint Unified School District, says there are differing migration patterns even among the relatively small community of about 40 “cyclical” students who attend school in her district between April and October.
“A third of our students may be attending bilingual classes in other districts when they are not here,” Kahn says. “Others may be in English-only classes, and those who attend school in Mexico are taking all their classes in Spanish. We try to provide some kind of continuum.”
The district employs one migrant intervention teacher who attempts to track each student’s educational journey—both in Davis and outside the district—and identify the gaps.
Desperately seeking data
Although the state is working diligently to refine its information systems to disaggregate data on migrant students, hard information is difficult to come by.
No Child Left Behind (ESEA’s current iteration) requires states to conduct comprehensive needs assessments of their respective migrant populations, and CDE appointed dozens of migrant program experts to tackle that task. The authors developed 40 “concern statements,” which were essentially questions they hoped to address about the well-being of migrant students—but they could only find enough data to discuss six of the 40. The 2007 report concluded that the lack of hard data was “perhaps one of the most important findings of the entire process.”
Since then, the state has contracted with WestEd, a nonprofit educational research laboratory, to operate the Migrant Student Information Project. As part of the undertaking, WestEd is collecting more precise statistics, both for regions and the state, about how migrant students are faring. WestEd now includes questions about students’ migrant status in its California Healthy Kids Surveys—annual reports that generate reams of data about the conditions of California children.
CDE has also fought hard to preserve and expand its California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, but state funding for the admittedly problem-plagued system has been in constant jeopardy—the last two governors both threatened to gut its funding.
“CALPADS is our only hope,” says Quintanilla, who reports each MEP region does its best to collect its own performance data. “We need to assign these students identifying numbers so we can follow them as they move through the system between districts, states or countries.”
As the wide discrepancy in migrant-student eligibility shows, though—300,000 in previous years compared to 200,000 this year—questions punctuate even the most basic data points. A recent federal audit of California’s migrant student program, during which federal officials tried to verify the status of a large sample of migrant families, permitted the state a 5 percent error rate in the identification of eligible migrant students.
That’s a pretty exacting standard, migrant advocates say, for identifying and tracking a population that by its very nature is transitory and distrustful of government. Parents, wary of authority figures, may be reluctant to answer the door when federal auditors come calling to check local eligibility numbers. (It’s not clear what percentage of migrant families are undocumented, but national migrant experts say about 28 percent of all migrants are in the country illegally. This is not an issue that concerns educators, and they are not legally permitted to inquire about the immigration status of their students.)
“Five to seven years ago, we identified nearly 2,000 students in Woodland who qualified for migrant services,” says Quintanilla, “Now only 500 are eligible. I don’t think the need for services has declined. I think it’s more difficult to qualify.”
Carol Brydolf ( cbrydolf@csba.org ) is a staff writer for California Schools.
Migrant education resources
California Migrant Education Portal
www.calmigranted.org/index.cfm
This online resource supports high-quality and sustainable practices with examples using video segments and model instructional content.
CDE Migrant Education Program
www.cde.ca.gov/sp/me/mt
This Web page includes links to the MEP’s Comprehensive Needs Assessment Report, its 23 regional offices and other resources.
Websites for the state’s largest Migrant Education Program regions
www.bcoe.org/migrant
http://migrant.fcoe.org
These reflect programs and services in Region II, headquartered in the Butte County Office of Education (bcoe.org) and Region IV, in the Fresno County Office of Education (fcoe.org).
U.S. Department of Education Office of Migrant Education
http://1.usa.gov/qHhvlm
The OME administers grant programs that provide academic and supportive services to the children of families who migrate to find work in the agricultural and fishing industries. Its Web page has links to Migrant Education Even Start, the College Assistance Migrant Program and
other resources.