Doors Opening for Migrant Students

Oxnard High School student Oscar Verdin knows he’s lucky.

His parents and five older brothers buy him clothes and supplies so he won’t have to get a job in the fields where they have all had to toil. They give him a $20 bonus when he brings home A’s. They keep quiet as he studies four hours a day at a desk in the living room under the 16 plaques he has won for academic achievement.

“They’re all counting on me,” said Verdin, a 16-year-old junior with a 4.0 grade-point average after only three years in the United States. “They support me.”

But his parents and brothers, only one of whom finished high school, don’t know how to guide him to success in American schools. For that, Verdin has turned to his counselor in Oxnard High’s migrant education program.

The federally funded program offers counseling, bilingual classes and independent study to students whose parents have moved within the last three years to follow the crops. The program started in 1965, part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and the movement for farm workers’ rights.

Oxnard schools have participated in the program since about 1970, said Joe Mendoza, migrant education director for the region, which encompasses most of Ventura County. This year, 10,500 students were enrolled in the regional program, which has a budget of about $4 million.

Across California, 41% of all public schools serve migrant students, more than in any other state, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the last two years, top graduates of the program at Oxnard High have gone on to Stanford University, said Pete Rivera, who coordinates the campus’ program. Verdin, one of 17 migrant students to get top honors at a ceremony Wednesday, hopes to follow them.

These students are bucking the odds. Across the country, migrant students do worse in school than almost any other group, according to the Education Department. Only about one in 10 completes the 12th grade.

The reasons for school problems are many. Migrant families move often, disrupting the school year. Although the program gives students booklets they can use for independent study, teachers say it is still tough for them to keep up.

Migrant students also face bureaucratic hurdles. They sometimes have trouble enrolling in a new school, when they cannot furnish documents such as leases or birth certificates, said Santos Gomez, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that it’s too easy for migrant students to slip through the system without ever figuring out how it works.

The son of Oxnard farm workers, Florentino Manzano is now an associate dean at Valley College. He recalls that in high school, his counselor called him to her office to tell him he had the grades to go to college. “I said, ‘Where is college?’ ”

These days, migrant students go on camping trips to build self-esteem and field trips to shadow professionals and tour colleges. Rivera said a group of nine will attend a special enrichment program this summer at Cal State Northridge’s Ventura County campus--the site of the planned Cal State Channel Islands University.

The top students labor in school with the same grit and drive their families apply to farm work.

Sandra Lopez, 16, got A’s in all her Oxnard High classes except physical education after only six months in the U.S. and her mother’s death from cancer in December.

“I promised my mother I would do my best to succeed in life,” said Lopez, a sophomore.

Now she lives with the family of her sister, a migrant strawberry picker who left home when Sandra was young. Lopez, who shares a bedroom with her 6-year-old niece, studies an hour or two each night in hopes of becoming a math teacher.

But the day-to-day problems of a struggling family can make it hard for Lopez to meet her goals. The family almost missed the awards ceremony because the lock on the front door broke as they were leaving the house.

In fact, only about half the Ventura County migrant honorees showed up at awards ceremonies this week, leaving piles of blue, embossed certificates and personalized plaques unclaimed. It’s not that the students don’t care, said director Mendoza, but they or their parents were picking strawberries at the same time as the early evening ceremonies.

Verdin’s mother, Herlinda, was at the ceremony to bask in her son’s achievement. Her husband has been disabled since a tractor accident decades ago ended his career picking almonds, walnuts and grapes. She worries that the family will not be able to help her son realize his dream of becoming an immigrants rights attorney.

“That career takes a long time in school,” she said. “Books are very expensive. Lots of times you dream for something, and it doesn’t work out.”

But she tries to keep her fears from her son, who sees the awards as markers on a path out of the fields.

Pointing to his newest plaque, he said: “I look at them when I study. They’re my inspiration.”