Mobile school trails its migrant students - Sisters of Mercy of the Americas set up pilot school that moves with migrant workers

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 14, 1994 by Leslie Wirpsa

FREMONT, Ohio -- Around the time the morning harvest sun begins to prod dew from the ground, nudging a carpet of mist over Ohio's fields of soybeans, pumpkins and tomatoes, Sister of Mercy Nancy Donovan jumps into her Chevy Cavalier to begin a most unusual school "bus" run.

She picks up children like Isabel and Eduardo and Lisa and Ernie and Jose and Ana Lupe and Rodolfo from the tiny white shacks they call home for six months of the year. She greets them in Spanish and in English, "Buenos dias, Rodolfo. Good morning. I'll bet you're going to have a good day today."

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After seat belts are fastened, she heads back across the fields, smiling as the children whine Mexican rancheras and glorious renditions of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" from the back seat.

The directions Donovan follows every morning and afternoon could have come right out of rural towns from the Mexican states of Michoacan or Monterrey: "Turn right after the silver bridge"; "Turn left after you see the llama farm"; "Take another left at the big tree."

But Donovan's daily route crosses 100 miles of Sandusky County, Ohio. She brings 19 rambunctious kindergarten and first-grade students to public-school bus stops so they can then be transported within the county to an experimental "mobile" school for Mexican and Mexican-American migrant children. The migrant school, a pilot project designed and run by the religious order, began its first semester in September, operating in Fremont from a classroom on loan from the Catholic St. Joseph School.

In November, four Sisters of Mercy of the Americas -- pastoral outreach worker Donovan, primary teachers Pat Lamb and Pat Kelly, program coordinator Gaye Moorhead and lay volunteer and nurse practitioner Jane Kallaus -- will pack up their classroom and their lives to relocate with the children and their families in Plant City, Fla.

Donovan will have to learn a whole new set of road landmarks to transport the children from their homes to school bus stops in Plant City.

The children's parents, migrant farm workers, will face new harvests of strawberries and citrus. But the children will be blessed with something familiar. Unlike other migrant children who have to switch from school to school as their parents follow harvests around the country, these youngsters will have the same teachers, the same "bus" driver, the same classmates and even their same drawings and paintings on the walls of a new classroom --two rooms on loan from San Jose grade school in Plant City.

This continuity, says Lamb, a 22-year veteran of primary school education, is essential to the educational, social and psychological development of these 5-and 6-year-old "survivors" of the precarious migrant life. The effort represents an attempt to design a new model for migrant educators nationwide.

"Many migrant children don't go to school at all. They don't want to start and then stop," Lamb said. "These children will now stay with their same teacher -- they will be with people who really know them."

Knowing he would be with his friends and have the same teachers in Florida was important to Eduardo Juarez, 6, a precocious first-grader at the Mercy school.

Eduardo loves to learn. His mother runs out of answers to his nonstop queries, like, "Why does the Jesus in the stained-glass windows at church have to carry a cross on his back?" or "Why does our neighbor say kids come in airplanes or with storks when kids really come out of their mother's bellies?"

Eduardo's parents speak only Spanish. But Eduardo has picked up almost fluent English on his own, from television, from preschool Head Start and from older children at the migrant camps where he lives. He appears not only bright, but even gifted.

Eduardo's mother, Maria Juarez, said he did not want to go to Florida because he did not want to leave the Mercy school. When she told him that his teachers were going with him, though, he happily packed his bags.

The Fremont-Plant City pilot project is designed to make it easier for migrant children like Eduardo to get the full education that could help them climb out of the poverty that makes their lives in the United States comparable to the lives of the poor in many parts of the so-called Third World.

According to a report on migrant life published by the National Governors' Association, migrant schooling is "at best ... a stop-and-start sporadic process -- one from which many drop out, discouraged by what they perceive as their failure, thus decreasing their chances to alter their lives substantially."

Margie Arevalo, 26, was caught in that trap, and she wants something better for her daughter, Isabel, 6, who is attending the Mercy school.

"The teachers at the public schools, lots of times they don't even want to register migrant children. They think you are a waste of their time. They don't see why they should do the paperwork," Arevalo said.

"And if they would enroll you, they wouldn't teach you. I remember asking how to do a problem in math, and the teacher would say, 'Just go sit in the back of the room because you're leaving in a few weeks anyway,'" Arevalo recalled. Her parents, she said, perhaps did not know this kind of treatment was "wrong."