A charter school in Immokalee, roughly 35 miles east of Fort Myers, wants to help migrant farm worker families overcome language barriers by using 21st century technology.
How?
The Immokalee Community School, run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, is bringing children and their migrant parents into the classroom.
We start this story inside a first-grade classroom at the Immokalee Community School. Here, math time doesn’t look like it did when I went to school in Florida and was learning subtraction. Marby Sanchez is working on 19 minus 12 on an iPad — music plays in the background as an electronic voice encourages him to try again.
Marby, like all of his classmates, is wearing a school uniform — a blue polo shirt and khakis. He’s part of the first class of first graders to use iPads last school year.
The school wanted to expose kids to tech as early as possible. Beatriz Drago, one of his teachers, grew up in this same community as the daughter of migrant farmworkers and explains why starting young is key.
“I try to teach my parents how to use a computer and that’s hard enough so as a little kid you’re more prone to, ‘Oh I made a mistake? OK!’ You’re not scared to make a mistake, you’re not scared to push that button,” Drago says. “It clicks right away for them.”
Immokalee is where most of the tomatoes in the U.S. come from during the winter season, but Drago wants kids to know there’s more to life in this town than agriculture.
“So they can see wow, Ms. Drago’s parents worked in the fields but she went to college and did something to help her parents so that she can make her parents proud and not have to work in the fields like they did,” she adds.
To help break that cycle of poverty, the school started sending first graders home with an iPad last school year to videotape themselves reading a story of their choice.
They have to read next to a parent, though. The goal is to improve their reading skills and get parents to feel like they’re integral to their children’s education — even if they might be illiterate themselves.
I went to see how Marby, the boy we met earlier, reads with his mom, Irma Sanchez. She’s from Guatemala. The family lives in a barely furnished two-bedroom apartment owned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There’s no wifi inside.
After he presses the red video record button, Marby starts to read “El BuenDiaMalo de Miguel” from a plastic folding table in a room he shares with his brother and sister. His mom, Irma, looks on.
This coming school year, teachers want to see parents asking questions about the story, not just looking on. They also want parents to learn how to use the iPads.
Rey Reyes, an expert on migrant education at the University of Texas at El Paso — says migrant parents do the work most people don’t want to do to put their kids through school. They want their children to succeed.
“I see a project like this as a way or as an opportunity for parents to really literally put their voice into the school system and into the education of their children.”
He says by showing up in these iPad videos they can prove that they care. He points out, though, that simply charging a battery or finding free wifi is hard for them, though. Parents work 10-hour days and often children work, too, to help meet quotas for the week or month.
The school has been working on ways to help them overcome these challenges. The school has recently received grants -- including $65,000 dollars from the Southwest Florida Community Foundation -- for this tech in school.
This fall, a group of parents will get to keep some low-cost tablets, and the campus will start to stay open late so parents can use its wifi.
They usually can’t make it to the library after work.
“Well, it closes at 5 — these are farmworkers who go out to the fields on buses so they don’t get home until late and then it’s the routine of home,” Brown says.
She hopes they’ll use the Internet to find community resources or use email to keep in touch when they leave to pick crops in other states.
“Parents are saying, yeah, this is yet another thing in our community where families are feeling marginalized and left behind.”
Late last May, Marby’s mom, Irma, told me they were leaving Florida before last school year ended to pick blueberries in North Carolina. Florida’s tomato season was really bad and they need the money. But the family plans to be back in Immokalee by this fall.
I couldn’t confirm whether they’re undocumented immigrants.
She told me she was happy that Marby will keep learning to read and write in Spanish in the second grade at the Immokalee Community School, which offers bilingual education. Sanchez speaks Spanish and Mam, a Mayan dialect spoken mostly in Guatemala.
No matter how much of 21st century American life they adapt to, she doesn’t want her kids to lose their mother tongue.
