With back and knees aching and the sun blazing overhead, Michelle Castillo detassels corn and picks vegetables in Illinois from May through October. She toils beside her grandfather and father, proof of how the migrant’s life indelibly defines her family.
But Castillo, 18, refuses to accept these fields as her destiny.
Throughout high school, she has toted a laptop computer from her home school in Texas to the farms of Illinois as part of a U.S. Department of Education pilot program. Almost every night, she boots up the computer to tackle online tests or projects assigned via e-mail. It no longer matters that she is miles from the nearest library; the Internet provides unlimited fodder for her research.
Now, as another harvest comes to a close, she is on track to graduate from high school–a feat neither her grandfather nor her father accomplished.
“I don’t think I’m anything special,” Castillo says. “Without this, maybe I’d be sitting here worrying about getting enough credits. Or I might not even be in school, like my friends who got pregnant or just dropped out.”
Migrant students like Castillo still inhabit a world of dilapidated trailers next to outhouses, jalopies making arduous treks from farm to farm. But a range of government-funded computer initiatives is moving the same students into the vanguard of 21st Century technology, providing high-tech global links with the click of a mouse.
The initiatives help migrant students overcome their largest educational obstacle: the frequent movement of their families from state to state. Educators say the programs also create a culture of academic achievement, something largely lacking in migrant families who know nothing but menial labor.
Students follow a `star’
About 50 migrant students who officially reside in Texas have each received a Toshiba laptop with a fax modem through a program named ESTRELLA, Spanish for “star.”
The machines are designed to provide an educational lifeline as the students migrate each year to Illinois, Montana, New York and Minnesota. After pledging to devote a certain number of hours a week to classwork, they log on to a central Internet site to receive assignments. On-site tutors help. So do cyber-mentors, college students who provide advice and encouragement via e-mail.
The project complements another federal program targeting migrant families in Florida that lets students receive Internet lessons through specially designed televisions. An initiative in Kentucky gives students bilingual CD-ROMs with curriculums that they can complete in school computer labs.
The equipment is so expensive that some educators doubt its practicality on a large scale. But prospects for migrant students are so dim–only half graduate from high school–that supporters will take even modest successes.
And migrant workers are becoming more numerous as farmers seek low-cost labor to provide cheap food to America’s dinner table.
An estimated 32,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers find employment in Illinois. In Downstate hamlets and Chicago suburbs, they clean harvested ears of corn, hoe fields or pick produce such as watermelons, peppers and onions.
About half of the nation’s migrant workers are undocumented immigrants, most from Mexico. Some are legal immigrants and the rest are U.S. citizens, like Castillo’s family.
Hundreds of miles from school
These days, Castillo can be found in the fields of Beecher, 40 miles south of Chicago, not in Mercedes High School just off the Rio Grande, about 25 miles west of Brownsville, where she is officially enrolled. She is missing football games. She won’t get her senior picture taken.
More damaging for migrant students, the growing seasons up north cause them to fall behind on coursework in their home schools.
“The deck is stacked against so many of these kids,” said Carol Sue Painter, who directs migrant education for the Kankakee school district. “I just wish we could say `Abracadabra’ and make all these problems go away.”
On her laptop, Castillo has mastered Powerpoint, Excel and other software, allowing her to prepare multimedia school reports complete with sound effects, animation and a rainbow of pie graphs and charts.
Her accomplishments have been a source of pride to Castillo’s parents, who always have emphasized education. Her father, Nuni, dropped out of school to work full time in the fields. Her mother, Chris, did receive her diploma.
“You don’t want to have to use your fingers and your back. You can use your mind,” her father once told her. “You want to be something.”
Even with family support, high school doesn’t come easy for migrants.
The same parents who offer encouragement also rely on their teenagers to help in the fields and earn money for the family’s livelihood. Students feel torn between their ambition to graduate and a desire to aid their parents.
A duty to her family
In many ways, Castillo is like most high school seniors. Thoughtful and perceptive, she blushes when her boyfriend is mentioned and frets about her soccer coach’s desire to make her the starting goalkeeper when she returns to Mercedes.
But she also carries worries that most teens don’t. She works weekends at a farmer’s vegetable stand and nearby flea market because she feels a duty to help her family raise money to build a new house in Texas. Her parents provide an allowance, and she earns pocket money by baby-sitting.
“We’re a family,” she said, “and my parents always said family comes first. They’ve worked hard and I feel like I should do what I can to help.”
Another student, Juan Gomez, balanced his laptop work with summer labor in the cornfields of Mendota, Ill. Rising at 4 a.m., he equipped himself with a long-sleeved shirt, boots and rain gear to avoid getting wet or scratched. To block out pesticides, he would cover his mouth with a bandanna.
About 6 p.m., he would stagger home, wolf down some dinner and try to study. He usually had the energy for no more than an hour, enough to keep up with his studies. He also worked at a Del Monte plant, less physically demanding but just as time-consuming.
Gomez, 19, graduated from a Mission, Texas, high school in May. Now he is brimming with confidence as he enters a college seminary this fall.
Cost raises hard questions
Although educators praise the technology initiatives, they wonder if the projects can be expanded on a large scale among the nation’s roughly 620,000 migrant students.
The question with ESTRELLA is not success but expense. Students enrolled in the program have completed more than 90 percent of their courses, but at a price. ESTRELLA spent about $400,000 this year on 50 students, about $8,000 per participant.
“We are doing some great things for these kids,” said David Rosalez, a regional migrant director in Oregon who helped start a technology program there. “The question is whether we can replicate it. A lot of that has to do with cost.”
But in this bleak world, one small triumph can beget another.
On track to graduate from high school, Castillo has set her sights on college and medical school. For her family, this borders on the revolutionary. None of the Castillos attended college, and she has never witnessed a graduation.
But next summer, the entire family plans to attend Castillo’s graduation. The contingent will include her sisters, Rebecca, 11, and Joselynn, 8, two precocious girls who clearly idolize Castillo, shadowing her constantly as she types away on the laptop.
“I want [my sisters] to follow me,” Castillo said. “I don’t want them to have any doubts that they can do anything they want.
“If they do, they can just look at me,” she added. “If I can do it….”
