ANAHEIM : Educator Seeks Out Migrant Children

Most teachers have few clues on how many students they will teach each year, but Sonia Duffoo is one educator who has direct control over the number of students she will serve. The more money she has to spend, the more students she can find.

Duffoo administers the education of children of migrant farm workers in Orange and San Diego counties. About 6,000 are enrolled in Orange County schools this year. That number may rise by 30% in the coming school year, she said, because she is hiring more people to find children who should be in school.

“There are definitely more kids out there,” said Duffoo, who was attending a national conference of educators for migrant workers at the Anaheim Convention Center on Wednesday.

If she had the money, for example, she said she could find four times the 45 students who attend a summer school program at Cal State Fullerton each year for ninth-graders preparing to enter high school.

The annual convention attracted 1,200 educators from 49 states. California has the biggest program for migrant students in the country, with 200,000 receiving services; next is Texas.

Students of migrant workers have special problems with language, health, housing and peer acceptance, educators said.

This year, conventioneers are talking about a report due in September to be issued to Congress, the result of three years of study commissioned by President Bush.

One early finding is that transfer of student records between schools takes an average of two to three weeks, and the data is sometimes lost. Some schoolchildren are being immunized in several states against the same diseases because of lost records.

Also, schools cannot agree on whether or how to credit a student for partial semesters. “A student gets easily disillusioned when that doesn’t happen,” said Thomas Lugo, director of migrant education for California and a son of migrant farm workers.

More than 50% of migrant students drop out of high school, Lugo added.

Actor-director Edward James Olmos spoke at the convention lunch and said young Latinos must be persuaded to graduate from high school. He has championed that cause for 15 years, most visibly when he played the former East Los Angeles calculus teacher Jaime Escalante in the film “Stand and Deliver.”

Olmos and several leading Latino artists--among them actor Rita Moreno, musician Carlos Santana and director Luis Valdez--are creating a 30-minute documentary starring high school students and dropouts, to be shown in classrooms beginning in the fall.

“Example was the only thing I understood, and that’s exactly what this film will provide,” Olmos said in a taped preview of the documentary, which is still in production. “It will allow kids to hear the positives and the negatives.”