Harvest of Hope

Preschooling for migrant kids

Playful pictures of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster dot the walls, and there are Bert and Ernie dolls to hug. Children frown in concentration as they glue pieces of macaroni to construction paper. An egg carton is converted to a colorful pin wheel.

The brightly painted room at the airy Methodist Church in Palmyra, Wis., resembles any nursery school. But the kids in Palmyra are not the usual class. Their parents are migrant farm workers, mostly Spanish-speaking of Mexican descent, who travel north from Texas to harvest onions in Wisconsin. Their average wage is $3.40 an hour. Families are on the road during June, September and October, school months for most other youngsters. Migrant children are often left by themselves, to pass the summer days playing in the dirt or escaping the heat under trucks and battered cars, while both parents work in the fields.

Many states have long tried to accommodate the odd schedule by operating a patchwork of migrant programs. But the Palmyra school and 21 others scattered throughout the Midwest are run by the Texas Migrant Council (TMC), based in Laredo, Texas, which each summer sends teachers north to staff its preschool network, using funds from a $4.1 million grant from the U.S. Head Start program. Before such programs existed, says TMC Executive Director Oscar Villarreal, "the infant children had no one to care for them when they were sick. They were left with ten-or twelve-year-old siblings who could not teach them very well because they just didn't know much."

Now a small yellow school bus with Texas license plates arrives as early as 6:45 a.m. at the Kincaid farm in Palmyra and whisks a load of children to the church, where they are fed breakfast. Those who need it are given a bath, then the teachers read stories and teach them songs. "We make home visits and try to build a relationship with the parents," says Head Start's Juan Cortes, an ex-migrant who spent his first summer in the fields at the age of four. Still, Cortes acknowledges, few parents visit their children's class, except on rainy days when they cannot work.

The migrant Head Start graduates hold their own academically through the second grade, but then they fall behind, teachers say, unable to master English and buffeted by their turbulent cross-country lives. "Quite honestly, most of the older migrant children are lost when they come here," says Walter Brey, principal of the Palmyra Elementary School, where older migrants attend school while in Wisconsin. But for their younger brothers and sisters, the grounding for education may be the only means of breaking the cycle of wandering and deprivation. Says Migrant Maria Covarabuis, a mother of five: "I want for my children to go to school and college and have a better future." In Palmyra, one teacher wears a T shirt that symbolizes the program, with a picture of a rising sun behind a green field. Underneath is written: MIGRANT EDUCATION, HARVEST OF HOPE.

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