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Migrant students
Standing in his living room, Aurelio Baeza Jr. looks wistful as he talks
about his last school.
"I miss it. I was in football, and I had lots of girlfriends," he said.
Aurelio Baeza is a normal 9-year-old boy. He likes football, already
likes girls and has a notebook that is covered with the artistic doodles
and flights of fancy any 9-year-old is prone to in class.
But he is different from his classmates.
His parents are migrant workers.
The Baezas have traveled across the country planting and picking the
crops for three generations. When gleaming apples and oranges, green
heads of lettuce and bunches of carrots appear in grocery stores, it is
because people like the Baezas have put them there. To do this job, they
move. They move across the state, across the country, as far as it takes
to get the job done. This makes education difficult and graduation rare
for the children in migrant families, Migrant Education Program director
Aurora Dominguez said.
Aurelio Baeza Jr. is one of 210 students currently enrolled in ECISD’s
branch of the Migrant Education Program.
"Yeah, it’s been a help. They offer school supplies and tutoring and
stuff like that for the kids," Aurelio Jr.’s father, Aurelio Baeza Sr.,
said.
A migrant student is defined as a student whose family moves out of the
school district for at least seven consecutive days every three years to
work in agriculture, fishing, dairy, packing or logging industries,
migrant counselor Maureena Benavides said.
The national Migrant Education Program estimates there are more than
800,000 migrant students across the country.
The typical migrant population varies across the nation, but most of the
migrant families in ECISD are Hispanic. As soon as school lets out, the
family packs up traveling to Pecos, Seminole, Kansas or Oklahoma,
wherever the work is.
Before the Migrant Education Program was put into place as Title I of
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, migrant children
were like tightrope walkers working without a net.
States were offering some aid to migrant students as early as the 1940s
and throughout the 1950s, but the mobile student population didn’t get
real attention, or aid, until famed journalist Edward R. Murrow turned
his attention to the migrant plight in 1960 with his documentary
"Harvest of Shame."
Sandy Demoss, a teacher’s aide at Permian High School, was a migrant
student in the 1950s and early 1960s.
"I was always the new kid and there was never anyone around to stick up
for me or help me," she said, shaking her head.
She never had school supplies, her clothes were ragged and her shoes had
cardboard in the feet.
She said it was hard to concentrate when she was hungry — and Demoss
said she was hungry a lot.
"I remember staring down at my books and thinking just how much I would
like to have something to eat. They had fresh baked bread and cold
bottles of milk that got served. I never had the nickel to buy them, but
I still think that is the most wonderful smell in the world. I still
remember how good that smelled," Demoss said.
Of seven children, Demoss was the only one to graduate high school — and
officials say high school graduation is still a problem with the migrant
population.
"It gets hard because they get older and start wanting to work and get
material things. We try to instill in them the value of education and
above all keep them in school," Dominguez said.
Their education can be disjointed as they change schools, Benavides
said, pointing out that switching districts means new curriculums,
different state requirements and other problems for the students.
"In high school and junior high, the students have a hard time fitting
in. They are different and at that age (when) it’s all about fitting in.
This makes them more susceptible to falling into the wrong crowd,"
Benavides said.
She works hard with the students, trying to help them belong, create the
drive for education and keep them in school.
She and the other employees work to fill in the gaps with migrant
students.
"I think a lot of (the students) would fall by the wayside without it.
We’re trying to make a difference, to give them that vision of success
and give them that vision of education. We’re trying to show them that
(education) will get you somewhere if you work hard enough," Dominguez
said.
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