PALM BEACH POST

January 23, 2009

Farmworker housing enclave includes after-school haven for Palm Beach County children

By LONA O'CONNOR

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

At 2:15 p.m., a tide of laughing children washes through the door of a small building on Hagen Ranch Road. These are the sons and daughters of 10 farmworker families who live at In the Pines, a small nonprofit enclave west of Boynton Beach.

The children are part of an after-school program, which started in 1998 at the request of parents. The program is a collaboration between the Farmworkers Children's Council, St. Jude Catholic Church in suburban Boca Raton, and other benefactors.

A similar program takes place at In the Pines South, west of Delray Beach.

The flat-roofed building that houses the after-school program mirrors the history of the people who use it. It served as a men's dormitory, back when farmworkers were mostly single men. Later, it was a commissary with big commercial stoves, then a two-apartment unit.

Now it is surrounded by freshly churned dirt, smoke and earth-moving equipment. By summer, the aging row of apartments is expected be replaced by new ones.

The after-school building is also scheduled for rehab and will get hurricane-resistant windows and a new air-conditioner.

Education used to be hit or miss for farmworkers' children in western Palm Beach County. Old-timers remember when kids working in the fields carried transistor radios tuned to the school district's educational station.

Now Donna Goray, who heads the Farmworkers Children's Council, can recite the names of kids who have gone to community college or beyond.

Goray started Campo Allegre, a summer program for farmworkers' kids, 28 years ago and later began an after-school program.

Some In the Pines' volunteers come from St. Jude and Vizcaya and other nearby suburban communities that displaced many farms.

The after-school program gets by with help from a loyal set of benefactors including West Boca High School and the Junior League of Boca Raton, which is paying for the new air-conditioner.

Volunteers pour milk and distribute snacks. Then everyone disperses to separate tables to begin their work. The younger children are joined by a few high school students, who make use of two computers in a quiet back room.

One volunteer, Steve Solimini, shows a table full of girls how to find the lowest common denominator in a fraction. Then they discuss metric conversions.

Pat Torres discovered In the Pines in the early 1990s when she was teaching English to adults as part of a ministry at St. Jude Catholic Church. Some volunteers are retired teachers like Torres, who spent eight years at Boca Raton Middle School. But there are other key qualities sought in volunteers:

"People who like children and have a sense of humor and a good heart, who can add, subtract, multiply and divide."