Boosting kids' chances of going on to school: Virginia day care center gives children of migrant farmworkers a head start

Food and Nutrition, Spring, 1990 by Marian Wig

Boosting Kids' Chances Of Going On To School

Irma Guel never was a teenager. She became an adult at 15 when he married and had a child. You grow up fast in a migrant camp.

"My first baby was only 5 months old when I got pregnant with my second one," Guel says. "I had a hard time raising both of them. They might as well have been twins."

Guel, 23, her husband, and their three children make a yearly round trip from Florida to Virginia with their Mexican-American families to plant and harvest crops such as tomatoes and green beans. For these migrant farmworkers, wages are minimal, particularly if the weather is inclement. Possessions are few, and many workers are undereducated.

Seeking more for

their children

Improving their lives hasn't been easy for the Guels because of the ramifications of trying to break away from a lifestyle that's been passed from generation to generation.

But thanks to a Virginia day care center where two federal programs join forces, the Guels are hopeful for a better life.

It's at the Parksley Migrant Head Start Center, on the 70-mile peninsula known as Virginia's Eastern Shore, that the two oldest Guel children received a special kind of guidance to prepare them for school.

Their 2-year-old brother is now attending the facility, which provides education, health care, and social activities to low-income children through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Head Start Program and nutritious meals through USDA's Child Care Food Program.

Coincidentally, Irma landed a job 2 years ago as an interpreter at the center, which serves a predominantly Spanish-speaking population. This seasonal position in Virginia allows her to spend 6 months out of the year closer to her children.

"At least one parent needs to get out of the fields to teach the children that there's something better out there," she says.

The center has had a positive effect not only on Irma but on her children as well. "I feel good about leaving my child here," she says. "My baby is really too young to talk, but i think he likes it here. If he didn't, he wouldn't be too ready to get on the bus in the morning."

Irma says her son looks forward to mealtime at the center. The menus for breakfast and lunch follow federal guidelines to meet the nutritional needs of the children who attend the center.

Arts and crafts and food are not the only things the center has to ease a young parent's mind.

"I know there's always a nurse here," Irma says. "If my child needs some kind of medication or needs to be seen by a doctor, they always take care of it. I can go to work and know he is all right. Where else can I leave him unless I pay for a babysitter? And I can't afford that.

"I think a lot of parents feel more comfortable leaving their children here at the day care center."

"Home away from

home" for 100 kids

Open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, the Parksley Migrant Head Start Center is a "home away from home" for some 100 kids.

A tall, old sycamore shades the Parksley Center's playground, where toddlers riding red and green scooters mimic truck sounds. Inside, infants sleep in cribs; a caregiver cradles one of them as though he were her own. Large letters made from blue construction paper read, "A beby needs hugs, kisses, cuddling, and most of all love. In another room, some wide-eyed preschoolers sit quietly, as a teacher reads one of their favorite stories.

It's close to lunchtime. Elizabeth and Daisey, the full-time cooks, have a large pot of homemade tomato and meat sauce simmering on the six-burner stove. They're cutting up fresh, locally grown carrots for the tossed salad. Pasta, green peas, french bread, and milk also will be offered to the kids, along with vanilla pudding for dessert.

But, things weren't always to idyllic.

"Children often were left in cars along the highway or in baskets in the fields while their parents worked," says Myron Miller, migrant Head Start director for the Virginia Council of Churches (VCC), which operates the center. "There was a need to have children in some place other than in the fields.

"The council, an organization of 13 major church groups in the state, began a ministry with a migrant farmworkers in 1948 to help these folks who stayed a short time in the state and lived in labor camps pretty much apart from the community. Their major need was day care."

The VCC has a long history of helping migrant children at the Eastern Shore. VCC volunteers, for example, have taught reading and writing in places like chapels and migrant camps, which often weren't large enough and had no running water except for the rain that came in through leaky roafs. Miller, an ordained minister had previously been involved with the migrant population in Florida when he was called to the VCC in 1956.

In 1974, VCC joined forces with East Coast Migrant Head Start, a grantee agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The corporation organizes and directs Head Start within delegate agencies. East Coast pays for the installation of plumbing, for example, which is required for a center to obtain a license to operate.