Migrant workers' children savor summer school

By David Crary

updated 4:19 p.m. ET July 24, 2005

SICKLERVILLE, N.J. - The work is grueling, the pay meager, and home might be a crowded bunkhouse or the back of a van, but migrant families in southern New Jersey for the blueberry harvest receive a perk worthy of their labors.

Their children, whether toddlers or teens, automatically qualify for a free, state-of-the-art summer school, with multilingual teachers encouraging pupils they might never see again after the berry season ends. While the parents toil in the fields, their sons and daughters might be exploring the Internet or practicing with a precision drill team.

Many of the families swiftly move on, heading to late-summer jobs in Maine or Michigan, then returning to Mexico or Florida for the winter before starting a northward trek again in the spring — their children experiencing school in short, disrupted spurts. Summer school — part of an imperfect but ambitious federal initiative — is intended to fill the gaps and keep the children within academic striking distance of their more stable peers.

Short stints
The challenges are numerous. Many of the children speak little English, and come from a hodgepodge of cultures and disjointed educational backgrounds. Some have never seen an eye doctor or dentist. Older children may prefer to be earning money in the fields. And the staff knows it has only six weeks to work with.

Mel Evans / AP Children of migrant workers, most of whom work in the seasonal blueberry industry, have a healthy lunch at an elementary school in Sicklerville, N.J., last month.

“One of the biggest challenges for the teachers is not having the satisfaction of seeing the long-term benefits of their work,” said Kathy Freudenberg, director of a nine-county New Jersey summer program that serves about 1,000 migrant children.

There are an estimated 860,000 school-age children of migrant workers in the United States — mostly Hispanic — with about 550,000 of them receiving some form of federally subsidized education. A $380 million budget covers both school-year and summer programs, which are administered by the states and considered vital in helping the children improve their relatively low chances of finishing high school.

Alma Ramirez, 14, is among those intent on graduating. Along with her parents and three siblings, she came to New Jersey two years ago from a village in Mexico’s Hidalgo state. She finished ninth grade in Clayton, N.J., this spring, and now — while her father works in a nursery — is at summer school.

While she’s learned English quickly, the language barrier has left Alma feeling a little isolated at her regular school; the summer program is a pleasant break. “There are just one or two kids (at Clayton) who speak Spanish,” she said. “But here I have a lot of friends who do.”

Not outsiders
Other migrant children also appreciate the chance not to be outsiders for once — and to avoid the teasing they often suffer at mainstream schools. “Americans have a problem with migrants,” Freudenberg said. “They want them to do the menial jobs, but don’t want them living in the community.”

Alma’s summer program is based at a large elementary school in Sicklerville, halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City in the heart of New Jersey’s blueberry country. Roughly 200 children are picked up from fieldside camps and rundown motels by a fleet of buses, brought to school in time for breakfast, then taken after classes to a summer camp for recreation and supper before heading back to their families.

Most of the families are from Mexico, others from Haiti; many of the children were born in far-flung American farming towns and thus are U.S. citizens. “The Haitian and Mexican kids are very distant — they don’t know each other’s culture,” Freudenberg said. “We try to promote harmony.”

To woo teens into class, the school offers some $6-an-hour part-time jobs, such as cleaning the cafeteria. Juan Carlos Castenada, a 14-year-old who has such a job, said the summer school is much bigger and better equipped than his three-classroom school in Toluca, Mexico.

“Here,” he said, “you get a lot of help with the things that you need.”

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