Many Skip School to Spend Holiday in Mexico

Just 12 of 20 students showed up in Gisella Likens’ kindergarten class at Edison Elementary School in Santa Ana last week, and she suspects it wasn’t because of missed buses or flu bugs.

They were beckoned, as students are every year, by family gatherings and holiday festivities in Mexico.

“Two of them let me know they wouldn’t be around, the others just disappeared,” Likens said.

This is one holiday tradition that school officials could do without.

For families with strong ties south of the border, Christmas and New Year’s is a period marked by reunions and religious festivals. Relatives in Mexico plan weddings and other family festivities at this time to welcome their expatriate members. Many students leave early for vacation and won’t return until mid-January, well after the break has ended.

The annual pilgrimage depletes classrooms and affects attendance at many Southern California schools with large Mexican immigrant populations. Officials at the 22,000-student Anaheim City School District, for example, said attendance dips by about 5% in December and January, and that affects the funds received from the state.

Worse, the practice puts children behind in their studies--children who often are struggling academically.

“Not only is it a loss of income for the schools,” said Anaheim City School District Assistant Supt. Paul Burkart, “but the kids are missing out on their education.”

Because of year-round school calendars, some students can miss anywhere from a couple of days to entire weeks of instruction.

“For most of our families,” said Edison Principal Mary Marquez, “it is not that they want to pull the kids from the school, but the parents work in industries that are slow this time of the year,” such as landscaping and construction.

Marquez estimated that about 35 of 750 students were missing from school, and probably were with relatives in Mexico. For families who are flying to Mexico, Marquez said, it may also be cheaper to buy tickets outside the peak travel times just before Christmas and shortly after New Year’s Day.

It is a big enough problem that some schools have taken steps to keep the children from falling behind.

The Oxnard Elementary School District experimented with temporary independent study programs that allowed parents to take instruction packages with them so their children would not fall behind, but that wasn’t successful, said district administrator Kathy Cooper.

“The teachers would go through all that work and when the kids returned they hadn’t done any of the work,” she said. “They had really been on vacation.”

Other districts take more dramatic measures. For the first time this year, all 1,700 students at Carr Intermediate School in Santa Ana will be off an entire month. The vacation at Carr started Dec. 17, when many families make their trek south. To make up the school time, Carr started classes in August, before most campuses.

At Edison and schools in the Oxnard Elementary School District, officials try to schedule students who are likely to travel in year-round calendars with breaks that coincide with their vacation plans.

Educators said they are mindful that many students have family obligations in Mexico. Some families may have saved all year for the only chance to see loved ones in their native towns.

But in overcrowded districts, fine-tuning schedules for the sake of cultural traditions is not always an option.

“Our calendar is not changed to accommodate students’ vacation plans,” said Los Angeles Unified School District spokeswoman Susan Cox.

Teachers and principals said they plead with parents to work their vacation plans around their children’s school schedule. Ten or more consecutive days of unexcused absences can mean that a student might lose a spot in the school, but even that argument generally fails to persuade families to leave later or return earlier. Students gone for longer might have to attend a different school, or a different class at the same school.

Exact numbers are hard to pinpoint because school officials cannot say with certainty how many of the missing students are on sojourns or are gone for other reasons. But absences seem to always spike at this time of the year at many schools from Oxnard to San Diego.

“Christmas is really a big deal down there,” Marquez said. “I tell the parents, ‘I know you are spending all that money, and you don’t want to just stay for two weeks, but school is also important.’ Ultimately, it is their decision.”

The Mexican government estimates that as many as 2 million citizens living abroad visit the country during Christmas and New Year’s holidays. At the San Ysidro border checkpoint south of San Diego, U.S. Customs Service spokesman Vincent Bond said the volume of southbound cars increased from 240,000 weekly to more than 300,000 the week before Christmas.

But Edison fourth-grader Danny Ortega was at school last week, waiting until school officially let out to start his vacation at his parents’ native town of San Gregorio.

“I can wait,” the 9-year-old said. He was scheduled to play in the school’s annual Christmas concert Thursday. “There are a lot of exciting things to do here too.”