Program helps migrant students

Correspondence classes keep children caught up with work

By Shalini Maharaj

Maria Elena Gonzalez took her entire junior year of high school English through a correspondence packet.

"You have no idea how much work it was," she said with a laugh. "I remember staying up at night and finishing the work. I learned the meaning of dedication."

Gonzalez, who is now a high school English teacher, earned high school credit through the Univerity's Migrant Student Graduation Enhancement Program, which helps migrant students throughout Texas earn their high school diplomas through long-distance learning.

For about 25 years, Gonzalez's parents were migrant workers who moved around the country every six months to find work picking crops and doing farm labor. This would mean changing schools frequently, making it difficult to complete classes.

"I remember they would work from 3 a.m. and come home at 6 in the afternoon with mud up to their knees. They always put this stress on education. Their goal was to break the cycle [of migrant work] through education," she said.

The program serves about 17,000 of Texas's 127,000 migrant school children.

Students must have moved with their families at least once within three years following some kind of temporal labor opportunity, such as crop harvesting, in order to qualify for the program, said Marta Estrada, one of the program's recruiters.

The program received the 2005 Minority Affairs Program Award earlier this month from the Association for Continuing Higher Education, a professional organization made up of deans and directors from various colleges and universities. Aside from correspondence learning by mail, students can also participate in long distance learning through the Internet and through computer disks and laptops loaned to them by the program, said the program's coordinator Peggy Wimberley.

It is not uncommon for migrant students to attend more than one school in a single school year, each with a different curriculum. Therefore, they may start one class and never get to finish it.

The University's learning program helps with this problem by sending work to the students so that they can take courses independently of their regular school work, regardless of where they live.

Students enrolled in the migrant education program have access to educational resources that they normally wouldn't have, such as computers and tutors to assist them in catching up on work they may have missed.

Yolanda Gonzalez, who is not related to Maria Elena Gonzalez, is one of the program's counselors in the Rio Grande Valley. She said a majority of the students she assists are second-generation Mexican-Americans.

"They haven't had sufficient information to know that there are other resources out there like technical schools," Yolanda Gonzalez said. "My job is to open up their eyes and show them that education is their success. One of my students said she wanted to own the field and not work in it any longer."

Hector Rodriguez, a former migrant worker and student of the program, recalled that he spent at least one summer hoeing sugar beets with his family.

"It was hard work. It was something you wouldn't want to be doing, so it motivated you to do better in school," he said.

Rodriguez is currently pursuing a mechanical engineering degree at South Texas Community College and plans to attend The University of Texas Pan-American.