Staff members at the East Coast Migrant Head Start Project, headquartered in Arlington, Va., keep close tabs on relocating families to help them find Migrant Head Start programs after each of their moves. At centers run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association in Southern Florida, directors attract families by hiring assistant childcare providers directly from the fields. “And they really do.”Īround the country, Migrant Head Start programs are trying various recruiting tactics. “They need to go straight to where the families are,” he said. Some are left with older siblings, or neighbors, who may be overwhelmed by their childcare load.Ĭleo Rodriguez, Jr., the executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association, said this has meant that program directors have had to spend a lot of time in the field. So part of our job is to connect them to assistance out in the community.” - Yeny Gutierrez, a Migrant Head Start staffer in Escalon, Calif.Ĭhildren who are not in preschool are brought to fields where they are often unsupervised, toxic pesticides abound and temperatures can rise into the 100s. “A lot of our families don’t know what services exist for them. ![]() Recent studies – including a 2013 report to Congress on dual-language learners in Head Start and Early Head Start programs – have found that, as a group, poor children with a limited grasp of English arrive in Head Start classrooms with more English language vocabulary delays, less access to dental and health care and fewer books at home than their English-language peers. Despite continued debate about the long-term impacts of the nation’s Head Start programs, which were founded in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, early childhood experts generally agree that the deficits migrant children face are more striking than those of native English-speaking children from equally poor families. The push to recruit children from migrant families is increasingly urgent, they say. They say finding needy students has become a calling and they now take their recruiting efforts as seriously as their educational offerings. Some Migrant Head Start critics have suggested that the lack of demand for the programs coupled with the limited dollars available to all Head Start programs means that there should be fewer programs for migrant children.īut Mitchell and her colleagues are taking a different approach. Related: Two Head Start Reports Find Stalled Progress And Some Hope Today, advocates estimate that a mere 19 percent of eligible children are being served by Migrant Head Start programs, and in California, which has more eligible children than any other state, a mere 10 percent are getting placements. Families’ reluctance to interact with government agencies has heightened. In recent years, those challenges have intensified, as more and more states have taken stronger measures to monitor and, in many cases, deport families who are here illegally. Drought, unemployment and changing migration patterns can make it hard to predict where families need support and how many will arrive in farm towns in any given season. Migrant workers are often undocumented and in many cases reluctant to take advantage of government-affiliated services. Leaders of the nation’s Migrant Head Start programs, which serve an estimated 34,000 children every year, say filling seats has been one of their toughest challenges for decades. All of this was to inform parents about local centers and what they offer. That afternoon, the team made stops at a vegetable processing plant, a local roadside farm stand, and a housing development bustling with farm workers and their children. ![]() 81 (Board Joliet, Mendota, Montgomery, Oswego, Plainfield, Rochelle, RomeovilleĦ1 (Board Pass, Anna, Carbondale, Centralia, Cobden, Lawrenceville, MurphysboroĨ1 (Board Grant Park, Kankakee, Momence, Pontiac, St.Family service workers Yeny Gutierrez and Daniela Hernandez talk to local farm workers about the area’s Migrant Head Start centers.
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