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Migrant kids take long step from fields to schools

By Staff | Sep 28, 2009

OCALA (AP) – Elizabeth Pineda climbs out of bed, her 4-year-old son Adrian asleep nearby. She lays out a tiny pair of shorts and a white T-shirt for his first day of school, gathers her purse and tiptoes outside. Her cousin will get the boy up and off to class in a few hours.

It is 4 a.m. and only a few solitary street lamps light the darkened roads in this rural central Florida community. She climbs into an old white Ford work van and starts the engine.

Pineda, the 20-year-old daughter of migrant farmworkers, is heading to the peanut fields.

It’s a story repeated in migrant families across the United States: A chain of labor that stretches from one generation to the next. As a little girl, Pineda helped pick oranges from the lowest branches as her father worked from a ladder overhead. As a single mother, she has sometimes had to bring Adrian along as well – letting him play with toy cars in the van while she picked peanuts nearby.

Private childcare is too expensive for most of these families, and the alternatives are limited.

The government offers a Head Start program for the children of migrant and seasonal laborers. But it serves only a fraction of those eligible, according to estimates by providers and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Waiting lists stretch hundreds of children long in parts of the country.

Those who can’t get in go to friends’ care, or to state-run pre-kindergartens or to the fields, where they are exposed to the heat, insects, chemicals and heavy machinery and where, each year, some children are hurt or even killed.

In this farming town, two Head Start centers have opened in the last year. And with a $26 million boost for Early Head Start in federal stimulus funds and separate $10 million expansion, nonprofit organizations around the country are hoping to expand enrollment of migrant infants and toddlers by thousands more.

The goal: Besides providing a safe haven, the programs offer access to basic social services, help teach English and aim to set these children on a path toward parity with their peers in kindergarten.

Pineda has enrolled Adrian. Her dream: That he never has to do what she does.

How many young children follow their parents into America’s fields isn’t known.

Care providers estimate that just under one-fifth of children eligible for Migrant and Seasonal Head Start are enrolled (about 35,000 in 2007, according to the most current national figures).

Yvette Sanchez-Fuentes, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association in Washington, said she accepted the estimate “just because of the amount of wait lists that they have across the country.”

In South Texas, there are 400 children on the waiting list of the largest provider of migrant Head Start services. During the peak season in Michigan, the waiting list sometimes exceeds 200 children, many of them vulnerable infants and toddlers, officials said.

Parents have become better educated about the dangers of the fields, Sanchez-Fuentes said, but still there are tragedies.

In Newport, Tenn., Arnulfo Hernandez and his wife, Esmeralda, took their 11-month-old son, Jesse, with them to the tomato fields in 2007. Other migrant families had encouraged them to enroll him in a Head Start program, but the young parents, then just 22 and 20, were reluctant to do so.

“They were very nervous about being apart from their baby, and we do hear about raids,” said J Davis, the nonprofit Telamon Corp.’s Tennessee state director. “‘What’s going to happen if I’m away from my child and immigration shows up and I disappear?'”

Migrant kids take long step from fields to schools

By Staff | Sep 28, 2009

OCALA (AP) – Elizabeth Pineda climbs out of bed, her 4-year-old son Adrian asleep nearby. She lays out a tiny pair of shorts and a white T-shirt for his first day of school, gathers her purse and tiptoes outside. Her cousin will get the boy up and off to class in a few hours.

It is 4 a.m. and only a few solitary street lamps light the darkened roads in this rural central Florida community. She climbs into an old white Ford work van and starts the engine.

Pineda, the 20-year-old daughter of migrant farmworkers, is heading to the peanut fields.

It’s a story repeated in migrant families across the United States: A chain of labor that stretches from one generation to the next. As a little girl, Pineda helped pick oranges from the lowest branches as her father worked from a ladder overhead. As a single mother, she has sometimes had to bring Adrian along as well – letting him play with toy cars in the van while she picked peanuts nearby.

Private childcare is too expensive for most of these families, and the alternatives are limited.

The government offers a Head Start program for the children of migrant and seasonal laborers. But it serves only a fraction of those eligible, according to estimates by providers and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Waiting lists stretch hundreds of children long in parts of the country.

Those who can’t get in go to friends’ care, or to state-run pre-kindergartens or to the fields, where they are exposed to the heat, insects, chemicals and heavy machinery and where, each year, some children are hurt or even killed.

In this farming town, two Head Start centers have opened in the last year. And with a $26 million boost for Early Head Start in federal stimulus funds and separate $10 million expansion, nonprofit organizations around the country are hoping to expand enrollment of migrant infants and toddlers by thousands more.

The goal: Besides providing a safe haven, the programs offer access to basic social services, help teach English and aim to set these children on a path toward parity with their peers in kindergarten.

Pineda has enrolled Adrian. Her dream: That he never has to do what she does.

How many young children follow their parents into America’s fields isn’t known.

Care providers estimate that just under one-fifth of children eligible for Migrant and Seasonal Head Start are enrolled (about 35,000 in 2007, according to the most current national figures).

Yvette Sanchez-Fuentes, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association in Washington, said she accepted the estimate “just because of the amount of wait lists that they have across the country.”

In South Texas, there are 400 children on the waiting list of the largest provider of migrant Head Start services. During the peak season in Michigan, the waiting list sometimes exceeds 200 children, many of them vulnerable infants and toddlers, officials said.

Parents have become better educated about the dangers of the fields, Sanchez-Fuentes said, but still there are tragedies.

In Newport, Tenn., Arnulfo Hernandez and his wife, Esmeralda, took their 11-month-old son, Jesse, with them to the tomato fields in 2007. Other migrant families had encouraged them to enroll him in a Head Start program, but the young parents, then just 22 and 20, were reluctant to do so.

“They were very nervous about being apart from their baby, and we do hear about raids,” said J Davis, the nonprofit Telamon Corp.’s Tennessee state director. “‘What’s going to happen if I’m away from my child and immigration shows up and I disappear?'”