Reaching Out : Education: Summer program keeps migrant students focused on learning by bringing classes into the neighborhood.

Jose Vasquez, a sixth-grader at Rio Plaza School in Oxnard, couldn’t attend the summer classes offered to children of migrant workers, so this year the school is coming to him.

Ventura County’s migrant education program has begun an outreach program aimed at keeping students focused on education during the summer months. If the students can’t attend classes, they complete assignments at home. Teachers meet with them weekly to review the work and teach lessons, emphasizing literature to strengthen language skills. During the school year, about 6,000 students in the migrant program receive remedial assistance, language help and counseling at their school. But during the summer, only 3,000 of the migrant students sign up for special classes.

“We were not absolutely sure where the other 50% were,” said Joe I. Mendoza, regional director of the county program.

His hunch is that many get jobs or work in the fields during the summer to bring much-needed money into the family. Others help their parents by baby-sitting younger children or visiting relatives in Mexico.

Keeping the students involved in school during the summer is important to Mendoza and other educators because the dropout rate among migrant students is 48% through high school, he said.

“During the summer, they are turned off to education,” he said. “Their decision not to continue with it is generally arrived at then. This (program) gives them a sense of continuity.”

He hopes the outreach will draw an additional 1,000 to 2,000 students into the summer classes or home study.

It was allergies that kept Jose, a math whiz who likes school, from attending the summer session or even going outside much, school officials learned Tuesday when they visited his mother, Leticia Vasquez, at her Oxnard home.

They told her about the home-study program and gave her a packet of assignments for her son to work on the first week. A teacher will come to her home weekly to assist him if he can’t go to the teacher, who also will meet children at various neighborhood settings, such as parks, churches or homes.

Vasquez, whose husband regularly works 12- to 15-hour days in the fields, has three other children already enrolled in summer classes. She was elated that Jose also will receive instruction. She praised the opportunities her children have had since she arrived in the United States 13 years ago.

“If I was going to be poor in Mexico, I’d rather be poor here,” she said through an interpreter.

Ventura County is among the first in the state to institute the summer outreach program, Mendoza said. San Diego and Kern counties offer similar services.

The program is federally funded as part of the county’s $4-million migrant education program. Director Mendoza has added nine teachers and 16 aides to his normal summer staff to operate the outreach program, which is open to children from preschool through 12th grade.

Those who attend three-hour classes at one of the program’s four school sites also receive snacks and lunch. Migrant high school students also can earn credit for classes during summer study.

“Their lifestyle is full of interruptions during the summer,” said Gil Villasenor of the migrant-education project. “We’re trying to keep them thinking about school.”

Not every migrant student responds positively when school staff members call them about attending summer school.

“Some say, ‘Hang it in your ear,’ ” Villasenor said. “The older ones want to work. We just want to enroll as many as we can.”