Doing Their Home Work : District Program Aids Migrants

As 1-year-old Anali struggled to snap together bright green and blue building blocks, two teachers from Valley Center Elementary School busily guided her older siblings through their homework.

Also crowded around the noisy kitchen table at the children’s home was Anali’s mother, Oliva Reyes, who participated in each of her three children’s assignments, something her mother had never done.

Trips to the Reyes mobile home on the San Pasqual Indian reservation have become routine for Natalie and Barbara Weston. The Westons are sisters and teachers who make house calls. Their goal is to help their students with homework and to give migrant families a better understanding of the education process.

“We notice that the younger children coming into kindergarten lack some of the real basic skills, like colors and counting to 5, even,” Barbara said. “By the time they get to us in kindergarten, a lot of the times the migrant children are already behind. Doing this sort of thing, getting them involved early, hopefully they will be up to par when they get to us.”

The Westons bring their teaching tools with them, including, on this occasion, building blocks for young Anali and books in English for 9-year-old Eunise.

“We try to include the parents as much as we can and get them to understand that something as simple as playing with blocks or coloring can be very useful,” Natalie said.

The migrant education program is similar to those in other districts, especially in North County, where the migrant population is growing and educational resources are shrinking. But the Valley Center Union School District’s program is the only one that regularly brings teachers into migrant homes.

Many Valley Center migrant families live in squalid conditions on the nearby Indian reservations, or in trailers and shacks on ranches and nurseries where many of the parents work.

Although most of the families have electricity and running water, carpeted floors are the exception, with concrete, cracked tile or wood being the norm. Teachers stress to parents the need to set aside a space specifically for studying, and they encourage them to make their children study while there is still sunlight.

About 15 teachers in the rural, 2,400-student district participate in the program that focuses on at-risk migrant students.

Valley Center educators hope their program, one of the most comprehensive in San Diego County, will make the Reyes kitchen scene part of an afternoon ritual for all migrant families.

Miguel Reyes brought his family to the United States five years ago from Guadalajara, Mexico, and ended up in Valley Center, where he is a construction worker.

Neither Oliva nor Miguel went beyond the sixth grade, but, like all parents, they want their children to complete their education. However, in a strange country and confronting a language barrier, the Reyeses weren’t sure what to do.

The answer came when the Valley Center district began its stepped-up effort to bring teachers into the homes of migrant families and to invite those families into the often-intimidating schools.

“Slowly, we are working to the point where parents feel that they are a part of the school, and they have as much say in it as anyone else in the community,” said Wendy Arciniega Heredia, a bilingual resource teacher with the district.

“The idea is to bring the families in as part of the educational process, even though they may not have the wherewithal to know that they can do that, and even though the parents may be illiterate,” Heredia said.

Getting parents involved, particularly those from migrant families, where illiteracy rates are high, is particularly important so the adults can convey to their children the importance and attainability of education, Heredia said.

Valley Center sends its teachers to the homes to learn firsthand about the living conditions of the families. Other districts usually send migrant education staff members rather than actual teachers.

Sonia Duffoo, regional director for migrant education with the San Diego County Office of Education, commends Valley Center for bringing the teachers themselves into the households.

“The teachers are the ones working with the kids during the day, and they have the primary responsibility for the teaching of these kids,” she said. “They need to know what it’s like for those kids and why they can’t study at home and what’s going on there.”

Although every family could probably benefit from teacher visits, Duffoo said, “migrant kids begin with more strikes against them than any other part of the student population, so they need this program.”

Maria Teresa Porter, program specialist for migrant education in Oceanside, heads the largest migrant education program in the county, with more than 1,300 students ranging in age from 3 to 22, up from about 800 students just two years ago.

Porter wishes she could send a teacher to the homes regularly, but the growing migrant population in Oceanside, combined with budget problems, makes that cost-prohibitive.

“It is very expensive to send a teacher out unless they are specifically going to work with a large group,” Porter said.

Unlike rural Valley Center, Oceanside has the advantage of having a migrant population concentrated in a small area near schools, making it more feasible for parents to come to the campus.

And Oceanside offers a summer school program for migrant students “so they don’t lose touch during the summer on things that they may have learned educationally during the school year,” Porter said.

Like Oceanside, Valley Center also invites families to school several times a year to teach parenting skills in education.

Besides the regular teacher visits to migrant families, the district has a visitation program in which every migrant parent is visited at least twice a year by the child’s teacher. In this program, educators often find that they have to teach migrant parents the basics when it comes to getting involved in their children’s education.

“Show that you care about his homework. Have him write daily,” Lorena Guerrero-Lopez, a fourth-grade teacher, told the mother of one of her students during a home visit. “I don’t know whether you have the opportunity to go out on different outings, but that, too, is a very good tool for education.”

Guerrero-Lopez, flanked by Heredia and a migrant services aide, gave a step-by-step presentation to Eva Maldonado on how she could take a greater role in her son Manuel’s education.

“Model for them how important the school is, and, if you do that, they will naturally follow,” said Guerrero-Lopez, sitting in a makeshift room on the side of a trailer.

Manuel was having difficulty with his homework, and Guerrero-Lopez proposed that the problem could be solved if the boy’s mother simply signed his homework so both parents and teacher would know the work had been completed.

“That’s a good idea,” Maldonado responded eagerly. “I’d like to go ahead and start that now.”

The Weston sisters have taken on the Reyes family as part of the district’s adopt-a-family program that targets particularly at-risk migrant students.

The result of these programs is that migrant families are brought closer to what previously had been an alien institution.

“They know that you care and that you’re not just that school out there,” Barbara Weston said. “You bring the parents in and they get more involved.”

Teachers also hope to get the youngest children interested in school by having them participate in exercises along with the older siblings.

“What we’re trying to do is model to the parents how to help and show them how they can do part of the work and have the children do the other part,” Natalie Weston explained as Reyes and her 7-year-old son, Isai, constructed a short-story booklet.

Oliva Reyes said her children have made significant progress in school since the Westons began making the visits.

“They learn more, and Isai has shown more interest in his work, and he really tries harder,” Reyes said.

“When they come home from school, I go out and meet them at the bus stop and we talk about what he sees on the way home, like the rocks that he picks up and the colors in them,” his mother said.