For migrants’ educations, a new degree of stability

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Twelve-year-old Jaime Bautista Jr. was a sixth-grader when his school year began in rural Echols County, Ga. After he and his family returned here for the winter vegetable season weeks ago, he was suddenly a fifth-grader again.

“This is the way it happens,” explained Jaime’s older sister, Maria, 21, as she sat in the family’s home in a migrant campground, her brother bent over his homework at a kitchen table. “The school systems are different, credits don’t transfer and then he falls further behind.”

By the time the child of a migrant farm worker turns 14--the legal age for full-time field work--the need for another income and the toll of travel often mean an end to formal education. The average migrant student will attend 24 schools by the time he or she reaches fifth grade, according to recent studies. The probability of a migrant student earning a high school diploma is about 50-50.

Now, in a state that ranks just behind California and Texas in migrant population, the Dade County schools’ Migrant Education Program has come up with a plan to provide more continuity. With a $600,000 annual federal grant, about 500 migrant families with school-age children will be given portable computer hookups and toll-free telephone numbers so they can stay in touch with home-based teachers while traveling.

The program, put together by Dade schools, Barry University and a consortium of school systems in several states along the migrant stream, is one of six experimental projects designed to use technology to overcome problems of dislocation and language that often sabotage migrants’ attempts to stay in school. Over the next five years, the programs in various parts of the country will receive a total of $3 million a year from the Office of Migrant Education, a division of the Department of Education.

Since Edward R. Murrow shocked the nation with his 1960 CBS documentary “Harvest of Shame,” some improvements have been made in the lives of those who move with the seasons from crop to crop. The OME was created in 1965 during the Johnson administration’s Great Society initiatives, and there are federal laws designed to set minimum standards for migrant housing, which is often squalid at best.

But migrant affairs are a low priority with most legislators and citizens. And for every advance, there is a Proposition 187, by which California voters decided to deny social services to the children of illegal immigrants. Some migrant workers enter the country illegally.

“They are the invisible children,” said Bayla White, Washington director of the OME. “They tend to fall behind because they may not be able to finish courses, or the educational systems and material differ from community to community.

“All the research tells us that when children fall behind in school, their chances of getting a diploma decrease. So our efforts in migrant education are geared toward overcoming disruption.”

Before 1965, the dropout rate for migrant children was estimated as high as 90%, White said. Now, of the 750,000 migrant children between the ages of 3 and 22 in the United States, about half will fail to get a high school diploma.

“That population remains very seriously at risk,” White said. “While the dropout rate may be better than 40 years ago, it is still unacceptable.”

By the time South Florida tomatoes and beans have been harvested, and Jaime Bautista and his family leave here for the squash fields of Georgia next spring, he and other students like him should be well-acquainted with one of five bilingual teachers who will track their academic progress through video-conferences and frequent e-mail contact over the Internet.

The teachers are to develop a learning plan for each student, go over lessons with students online when possible and encourage parents to participate by learning to use the computer. The Dade teachers will also keep in touch with the teachers in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Pennsylvania, when Jaime and the others show up there.

“Family involvement is critical,” said Richard J. Albaugh, who is directing the project for Dade’s Migrant Education Program.

Albaugh, a child of migrant parents himself who helped write the grant proposal, said he hopes Dade County’s experiment will provide a model for a national tracking system that will keep the children of any families that move often from disappearing from school rolls.

In the first year of the project, 100 families will be randomly selected from about 1,000 migrant families who spend at least several months each year in Dade County. The vast majority are Mexican American, with others of Haitian and Guatemalan origin.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.