Workshop Will Teach Migrants to Aid Children’s Education

The first conference for Latino migrants in the Santa Clarita Valley will teach parents unfamiliar with the educational system how to help their children succeed in school and possibly enter college.

The half-day workshop Saturday, organized by the Los Angeles County office of education, targets parents of the estimated 250 migrant children attending schools in the area.

“The program will give them information on what to expect in changing technologies and what part science is having in creating and changing job roles,” said Carol Ramnarine of the county’s Migrant Education Project. “It will also tell them what types of choices they will have to make in giving guidance to their children through their school years.”

Ramnarine said migrant parents, many of whom have not graduated from high school, have difficulty “understanding the demands of higher education and what it takes to succeed,” although they are very supportive of education.

“College is like a foreign concept to them,” Ramnarine said.

Young adults in a migrant family, she said, are often pulled between the need to work to bolster the family’s income and the desire to go to college.

Many Santa Clarita families labeled as migrants, Ramnarine said, no longer follow the harvest of crops along the West Coast as they did in the past, pulling their children out of school with them.

“Many of our parents still pick crops, but they commute now,” she said. “They may travel off now to Piru or Ventura or up to Santa Barbara, but they come back and use Santa Clarita as their home base.” Enrollment in the county’s Migrant Education Project in the Santa Clarita Valley has declined from 274 students two years ago to about 200 this year, a trend that education officials attribute to the rapid urbanization of the area.

Boskovich Farms, which had been a longtime grower in the Santa Clarita Valley and a major employer of migrant labor, left the area last year, leaving unemployed many migrant workers who had toiled the onion, radish and parsley fields in Val Verde.

“Most of the workers that worked those fields have moved out, mostly to the Ventura County area,” said Jorge A. Cordero of the office of education.

The three-session event, to be held at Peachland Elementary School in Newhall, will include a program on the need for scientific and technical training for the job market, educational issues affecting minority children and how to enter and pay for college.