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2
MIGRANT CHILDREN'S EDUCATION
AND
COLLEGE STUDENT VOLUNTEERISM
A Report to the U.S. Department of Education
Prepared by Lisa Hazirjian and Carolyn Corrie for the Migrant
Children's Education and Documentation Project at the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
MIGRANT CHILDREN'S EDUCATION
AND
COLLEGE STUDENT VOLUNTEERISM
A Report to the U.S. Department of Education
Prepared by Lisa Hazirjian and Carolyn Corrie for the Migrant
Children's Education and Documentation Project at the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report relates the findings and recommendations of
the Duke Center for Documentary Studies' Migrant Children's
Education and Documentation Project. The mission of our two
year pilot project has been to determine the effects of
college student volunteerism upon the education of migrant
children and to develop a national plan for greater college
student volunteer involvement with the agencies that serve
them. Over the past two years, we have involved Duke students
in the lives of migrant farmworker children in eastern North
Carolina, both to document their special educational needs
and to determine how college students could best help meet
those needs.
The main component of our project has been a ten week
service-learning internship for fourteen Duke students and
recent graduates during the summer of 1990 and eight during
the summer of 1991. Each summer, students lived in a rural
community in North Carolina and worked with migrant and
seasonal farmworker families in a public school program, a
Migrant Head Start center, a migrant health clinic and a
legal services program, as well as through individual
tutoring efforts.
We found a common link in the motivations of all the
participants in this project, from the Department of
Education and the Center for Documentary Studies, to the
college student interns, to the service providers and
advocates in whose agencies the students worked. While each
individual's specific motives may have varied widely, each
has shared a deep concern for the futures of migrant
children. While we applaud this caring about the lives of
others, we would like to suggest that we all try harder to
include farmworkers themselves in decisions about programs
that will affect them. This project has attempted to do so
through a documentary method of inquiry, letting migrant
children and adults speak for themselves as much as possible.
We have examined the latest college student volunteer
movement through a study of national and regional
organizations which promote service and a close look at
specific campus-based volunteer programs at a sampling of
schools. These examples, many of them new programs, indicate
the increase in the numbers of students involved in service
and give an idea of the variety of the programs available.
Students across the nation have demonstrated tremendous
creativity and commitment as they find ways to link their
lives with members of the communities around them.
We have profiled three national organizations--SCALE
(Student Coalition for Action in Literacy Education), Empty
the Shelters, and Break Away: The Alternative Break
Connection--which we see as the most appropriate models upon
which to base a national program promoting student
volunteerism with migrant families. The recent college
graduates who founded and currently lead these three programs
i
provide examples of some of the best methods for creating
networks among student volunteers and promoting increased
community service. Even with small staffs and limited
budgets, they are able to inspire students, help build strong
campus-based volunteer programs, serve as clearinghouses for
information, and effectively link students from all over the
country.
We have examined the components of our own summer
internship program, including the initiation of the project,
recruitment of interns, preparation for the summer, the
housing search, intern placements, orientation, funding, and
the internship experience itself. We conclude that interns
have much to offer migrant children and the agencies which
serve them. Interns bring gifts of enthusiasm, creativity,
friendship, and special skills, such as Spanish-speaking
ability. In return, interns learn many valuable lessons from
both farmworkers and agency staff.
We found that in order for internship projects to be of
the most benefit, good communication among all parties is
essential. Interns and the sponsoring agencies must have
clear expectations about their goals and roles for the
summer. Preparation by both the interns and the agencies is
also critical. Interns who are able to speak Spanish are most
valuable to the organizations, and some experience in
education is helpful for interns working in the school
programs.
Through the interns' observations, the comments of
service providers, and the words of migrant children
themselves, we have described what these observers define as
the primary educational needs of migrant children and the
programs that serve them. Many of these needs cannot be
filled by even the most dedicated efforts of volunteers.
Farmworkers' low wages rarely earn them enough family income
to rise above the poverty line. In order to meet even their
basic family needs, children must work in the fields, from as
young as age four. Some children miss many days of school and
fall far behind their peers; others simply drop out. In
addition, the mobility of their lifestyle contributes to poor
attendance and the difficulty of keeping up with other
students or staying in school at all.
These difficulties are compounded by the language
barriers faced by todays' migrant students, who are
predominantly Hispanic. Educational programs need to find
teachers who speak Spanish in order to help children catch up
in other subjects while they are learning English and to
enable schools to communicate with parents. In addition,
special attention should be given to providing individualized
English language instruction.
Other barriers to educational achievement include
transportation difficulties. Migrant families live in
isolated areas and current transportation services are
inadequate for their needs. Few families have their own cars
to bring children to school. Quality of teaching was also
ii
noted as a problem in the programs where interns worked, a
problem common to many rural school districts.
These problems underscore the need for greater funding
for migrant education programs and all service agencies for
farmworkers. Severe budget cuts over the past decade have
reduced the length and the quality of migrant programs. Only
with increased funding will teacher/child ratios be reduced,
improving individual attention and care for all children. In
addition, better funded programs will be able to hire the
teaching staff required and the materials necessary for
quality instruction
Migrant students often lack self-determination and
tend to look to others for direction. Their lack of self-
esteem is particularly troubling, and is one area where
college students could work to make a real difference.
We have three major recommendations for ways to better
meet the educational needs of migrant children. First, we
urge the federal government to commit greater resources to
migrant education programs. With current levels of funding we
will never be able to meet adequately the basic needs of even
the few children who manage to make their way into the
school-based programs for which they are eligible. Increased
levels of funding will allow for better teachers and
materials, smaller class size, and longer summer programs.
Second, we recommend an increased effort to accommodate
the special educational needs of migrant children through
innovative programs that take into account the migrant
lifestyle and through special language instruction for
students whose native language is not English.
Our final recommendation is for a national program to
foster increased student volunteerism with migrant families.
iii
INTRODUCTION
This report examines how college student volunteerism can be
channeled toward contributing to migrant education programs. It
is based upon our experiences organizing and participating in our
two-year pilot summer internship program, and our discussions with
participants in the summer program, student volunteer groups,
migrant education practitioners and policymakers; we are grateful
to them all for their cooperation and contributions.
We have attempted to draw from a broad range of sources and
numerous points of view. However, there are undoubtedly many
other college volunteer efforts and local migrant education
agencies from which much can be learned. This report is not
intended to be an all-inclusive or exhaustive study on the topic.
It presents our conclusions from our experiences and the
recommendations we are able to make on how to best involve college
student volunteers in the educations of migrant children and the
provision of other types of services to migrant and seasonal
farmworker families.
In the spring of 1990 the Center for Documentary Studies
embarked on the Migrant Children's Education and Documentation
Project. Under the direction of Dr. Robert Coles, a Center
associate and the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Children of
Crisis, fourteen Duke students helped design, prepared for, and
participated in a summer service-learning internship program in
rural North Carolina. They spent ten weeks learning about the
lives of migrant farmworkers and their families by volunteering
with agencies that provide for the educational needs of migrant
children.
For many of the interns, their experiences with farmworker
families did not end with the termination of the internship in
August. One went on to full time employment with the East Coast
Migrant Health Project. Another followed a family back to Texas
and Mexico, and spent time in Florida working with children, all
the while documenting their lives with his camera. Another former
intern spent several months interviewing three families who had
settled out of the migrant stream in North Carolina. Several
members of the group worked hard to produce a book of photographs,
essays and poetry which we have called "Migrant Summer." Another
student put together a traveling art and photography exhibit that
included work of the interns as well as the migrant children. Two
students decided to coordinate the project for the new group of
eight interns, and prepared for the summer of 1991.
Over the course of two summers, interns worked with over 250
migrant children in East Coast Migrant Head Start centers in
Smithfield and Newton Grove and in the Johnston County Public
Schools Migrant Summer School program in Benson. They provided
voluntary assistance to chronically overburdened staffs and
1
offered individualized attention to inadequately served students.
As teaching assistants they worked one-on-one with their pupils,
reading to pre-schoolers, spelling with third graders, explaining
mathematical concepts to teenagers, and offering encouragement to
all. As art, computer, and physical education instructors, they
added exciting, creative activities to the school day. Perhaps
more valuable than anything else, the interns became friends,
confidantes, and role models to the children they met.
For one week in the summer of 1990 and two weeks in the
summer of 1991 the Center sponsored an intensive documentary
workshop in the Benson public school program. Wendy Ewald, a
documentary photographer and teacher whose work with children
includes her book Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by
Children of the Appalachians, led classes for fourth, fifth, and
sixth graders. The first summer, students produced documentary
projects about their families and their communities, using
Polaroid cameras previously donated to the Center for a project in
Durham led by Ms. Ewald. The second summer, the students moved on
to learn and practice black and white photography. The
photographic and writing project gave these students an exciting
opportunity to reflect and to share creatively the aspects of
their lives that are rarely addressed in school.
Although the summer program was originally organized as a
school-based education project, an early lesson learned by the
interns was that a migrant child's education is affected by much
more than what goes on in a schoolroom. The interns realized that
they could learn a great deal and also offer important assistance
to farmworkers by working outside of the schools. The first
summer, many interns worked part-time at Farmworkers Legal
Services and Tri-County Community Health Center, assisting the
staffs of these organizations in many ways, particularly with
outreach to the camps and the provision of transportation to the
clinic or other places farmworkers needed to go. These additional
volunteer efforts developed into full-time internship placements
for the summer of 1991. Some interns spent evenings at labor camps
and trailers, tutoring and playing with children in their homes.
Others attended church services and assisted in church-based
programs for the migrant population.
The project's mission, at the most basic level, has been to
determine the effects of student volunteerism upon the education
of migrant children and to develop a national plan for greater
college volunteer involvement with the agencies that serve them.
The individual missions of the project's participants, however,
have been rooted less in research and policy development goals
than in deeper personal reasons. The personal motivations that
underlay the desire of hundreds of individuals to participate in
this project, from those at the Department of Education to those
at the Center for Documentary Studies, to the students of Duke
University, the administrators and teachers at the Migrant Head
Start centers and the Johnston County Migrant Summer School
program, the children and parents who use these programs, and the
staffs of the Tri-County Community Health Center and Farmworkers
2
Legal Services, merit some discussion to place the project and
this report in proper perspective.
All the people involved in this project have been united by a
common and profound concern for the well-being of this nation's
migratory children and their families. Let us not enumerate here
the specific injustices withstood by generations of migrant and
seasonal agricultural and fishery laborers and their families; at
this moment, we do not need to know those facts. At this moment,
all of us need to be reminded that as human beings we do not and
should never need a battery of reasons to care about the
conditions of one another's lives.
As humans, we care. The future of migrant children, the
future of this nation as a whole, must constantly be linked and
relinked to the fundamental motivation that underlies our
political and social agendas. Our success in meeting the nation's
challenges is contingent upon our ability to draw upon our shared
compassion as a means to transcend the obstacles and divisiveness
inherent in our struggles.
In order to develop a plan for nationwide student volunteer
service with agencies that serve migrant children, it is
worthwhile to consider the particular motivations of the groups
who would be actively involved in such a program. The reasons
student volunteers cite for their participation in community
service projects are as varied as the individuals themselves.
What is most striking about all their explanations, however, is
the odd combination of tentativeness and assertiveness that
characterize their searches for what they feel are adequate
responses to questions about their motivations. The tone of their
answers, as much as the content, suggests that college students'
decisions to devote an hour or a summer to community service
should be considered as they consider them, in the context of the
lives they lead. College students lives are structured by
questions, not just about daily lessons but, more broadly, about
personhood. Their lives are shaped by answers, by theories and by
decisions about what roles they are to play in the world. Quite
often, their choices to participate in community service reflect
both a deliberate, reasoned step toward defining their lives in
the context of a community in which they share, and an uncertainty
and curiosity about their identities as a member of American
society.
The enthusiasm agencies show for the idea of increasing
volunteer participation in their programs, while encouraging to
those seeking a place to contribute their services, should be
understood first and foremost as a discouraging sign. Agencies
dedicated to providing migrant education programs and other
services for farmworkers are desperate for help. They cannot
afford to hire either the quantity or quality of staff they need
if they are to do a thorough job of addressing their clients'
needs. There are rarely enough teachers to provide migrant
children with the one-on-one tutoring that offers the most promise
for meeting the challenges of migrant education, and there are too
few teachers adequately skilled in speaking Spanish, the native
language of the majority of today's migrant children. The
educational infrastructure constructed to meet the specific
3
educational needs of migrant children is in desperate need of
fortification. It is no wonder that migrant educators welcome any
assistance they are offered.
Finally, it is important to be sensitive to the element of
paternalism in our collective decision--that of the Department of
Education and the Center for Documentary Studies--to create a new
plan to help address the needs of a population of which we are not
a part. It is peculiar, at times even embarrassing, that we take
it upon ourselves to help these migrant people, often without
giving adequate consideration to what they would do, what programs
they would develop, if they were the ones with the power to make
these decisions.
This project has not gone to great enough lengths to include
the migrant population in the planning of programs to better meet
their needs, but it has attempted to begin this process. By
taking a documentary approach to much of the work related to this
project, we have attempted to let migrant children, parents and
families be our guides. The oral history and group documentary
publication that accompany this more formal report are essential
elements in this project. These documents give voice to the
people in behalf of whom we are working, as they themselves speak
on their own behalf. Still, more should be done by this program
and all programs that seek to assist farmworkers to solicit the
input of farmworkers themselves. It is their lives that are
affected by the plans and policies that are made by concerned
others. In addition, we should spend more time seeking solutions
that would eliminate the need for many of these services by
empowering farmworkers themselves to make significant changes in
their own living and working conditions.
The primary educational needs of migrant children, as
observed by participants in the Center's migrant project and as
noted by the migrants, educators, and policy analysts with whom we
have conferred, can be gleaned from the labels we assign them. As
migratory people, these children suffer from the educational
deficits that result from moving from school to school, sometimes
many times during the school year. As members of migratory
farmlaborer households, they often join their elders at work; low
wages and an unpredictable supply of work for migratory laborers
frequently demand that every member of a family work. Sometimes
the appeal of an income and the tangible results of field labor
are more inviting than attendance in new schools with unfamiliar
students and, sometimes, unsupportive teachers. As migrants,
these children need the means to keep pace with schoolwork, and
they would benefit from programs that would counteract the
temporariness and uprootedness of their lives.
As children, they need to be cared for and nurtured. Horace
A. Judson, a former migrant child who beat the odds, earned a
Ph.D. from Cornell University and went on to be a college
administrator, wrote in "Reflections of a Former Migrant" of the
needs migrants have as children and the role teachers can play in
their lives:
4
The qualities needed for teachers of migrants are
probably not different from those needed by any other
teacher, except maybe in degree, professional dedication,
subject area mastery and, above all, respect and concern for
others, as well as an abiding understanding and belief in
the worth of each individual. You cannot really teach
someone you do not respect. A student without self-respect
cannot maximally benefit from the educational process, if at
all
Self-respect is a necessary prerequisite and an
essential continuous element in the educational process. As
teachers of migrant students, you can have no greater goal
than to help students establish a sense of self-worth if
they do not have it, and to maintain it if they do. By the
same token, you can commit no greater travesty than to erode
some vulnerable student's positive self-image.
Because of the particular circumstances of their lives, migrant
children are more likely to be heavily influenced by the positive
--or negative--experiences they have with educators. But all
children, not just migrants, need the kind of teachers Dr. Judson
describes.
The vast majority of migrant children in most regions of the
nation today are Hispanic. Many of them are the first ones in
their families to learn English. Like all children whose native
languages are not English, migrant children are at a tremendous
educational disadvantage in most American schools. They often are
unable to understand lessons and homework assignments, and they
have few places to turn for extra help. They need to be
instructed in the language they understand while they are being
taught to understand the standard language of instruction, or else
they fall even further behind.
While concerned in part with evaluating the effects of
student volunteerism on the education of migrant children, the
Migrant Children's Education Project bases the rest of its mission
upon the assumption that student volunteers can and should make a
positive contribution to agencies that work with migrant children.
Certainly there is much that college students can add to the
educational lives of migrant children--there may even be some
things that college students, more than any other group of people,
are best equipped to provide--but the scope and magnitude of
problems afflicting migrant children's lives are far beyond the
realm of what student volunteers have the resources to address.
Everyone involved with this project has expressed
apprehension about recommending a national program of student
volunteerism as a solution to the problems in migrant education.
We cannot in good conscience endorse our own plan without
insisting that a much greater commitment of federal resources be
allocated to migrant education programs. Student volunteers
cannot be maximally effective in the present system of migrant
education; on the contrary, just like migrant educators and
children, they can only make do with the paltry resources
presently at their disposal. Perhaps more importantly, volunteers
5
should not bear the responsibility of offering critical services
that ought to be provided by professionals.
Is it absurd to fear that a social policy totally dependent
upon volunteer efforts might emerge? Perhaps not. Indeed, we need
search no further than last winter's State of the Union address to
find evidence that volunteerism has become a cornerstone of this
nation's social policy. The Bush administration's sincere
dedication to the promotion of community service appears devoid of
any appreciation of the need for federal services. While
encouraging civic responsibility, the federal government continues
to act with irresponsibility, by failing to provide the national
resources at its disposal to the people most in need. We would
like to offer a different vision of community service, one which
recognizes the shared responsibility and interdependence of all
segments of our society, public and private.
6
STUDENT VOLUNTEERISM
Many people wrongly apply the 1980's label "Me Generation" to
young people today. No term could possibly capture the broad
range of ideals espoused by students of the 1990's, but trends on
campuses across the nation indicate that the label "WE Generation"
would more aptly describe the character of today's young people.
Campus Compact, a coalition of college and university presidents
who are committed to fostering public service opportunities on
their campuses, recently compiled information on trends in student
service. They cite dramatic rises in student involvement in
campus-based service ranging from 40% to 400% at colleges and
universities around the nation, and a concurrent growth of
national, regional and campus-based student service organizations.
The results of this surge in student service is manifested in
benefits both to the communities where students volunteer and to
students themselves. Despite the difficulty of the challenges
they face, college volunteers around the country have a
substantial, positive impact upon other people's lives. They help
agencies stretch their limited resources and allow them to address
more people's needs more thoroughly. Especially important in work
with children, student volunteers bring individualized attention,
enthusiasm and hope to strained agencies and needful people.
The impact of service experiences upon students' lives is
tremendous. Volunteerism provides students with an opportunity to
extend their educations beyond the theoretical realm of the
classroom and into the practical arena of the community. Through
working within a community, volunteers learn about not just the
complexities of meeting human needs, but also the importance of
compassion and citizenship to meeting those needs. Volunteerism
deepens students' sense of responsibility for others and helps
them to think more critically about how to fulfill their
responsibility as members of American society.
Now is an ideal time both to investigate the nature and
success of student service programs and to generate student
interest in volunteering with new agencies and populations. This
section first looks briefly at the student service network, the
functions they serve, and the educational initiatives they have
sponsored. Then it looks further at a selection of campus-based
service programs, many of them oriented toward addressing the
needs of migrant or homeless families, in order to determine what
sorts of education-oriented volunteer activities have been most
successful. As a compilation of college volunteer projects aimed
at educating younger children, it is only a small start; a
thorough directory of these projects would be an invaluable tool
for students, educators and others interested in establishing or
improving this kind of service project. Finally, this section
provides a more in-depth profile of three new national
organizations promoting student service which we have found
particularly helpful in shaping our own plans for a national
network of student volunteers working with farmworkers and their
families.
7
The Student Service Network: National and Regional
Organizations
For further information on these organizations and their
publications, please see the bibliography and list of
organizations in the accompanying manual, Into the Fields: A Guide
and Resource Manual for Student Initiatives with Farmworkers.
ACTION:
Under the Domestic Service Act of 1973, secondary and post-
secondary students are encouraged to participate on a part-time
basis in community-based service projects. The Student Community
Service Program (SCS), an ACTION program, focuses on involving
students in projects to help combat poverty and poverty-related
problems. Recent SCS programs included projects at the Geneseo
Migrant Center and at the Cornell University College of Human
Ecology, both in New York. The Geneseo program involved area
students in a wide range of activities aimed at meeting the needs
of the region's migrant population, while the Cornell program
paired local high school students, many of them from recently
settled farmworker families, with migrant children in Big Brother
and Big Sister programs. The volunteers also tutored adults and
helped to organize artistic and cultural events.
Bay Area Homelessness Program:
The Bay Area Homelessness Program is an example of a multi-
university collaboration around a single issue of common concern.
Students from nine colleges and universities in the San Francisco
area encourage student volunteerism with agencies serving the
needs of the region's homeless population and teach others about
homelessness. Coordinated by members at San Francisco State
University, the program stresses the importance of homelessness
prevention.
California Mini-Corps:
The California Mini-Corps program is not actually a service
project, but rather a formal training program for future teachers
of migrant children. Mini-Corps provides paid opportunities for
former migrant students who are in college pursuing a teaching
career to work as teaching assistants and role models in
classrooms with migrant children. Mini-Corps participants help
provide for students' educational needs, serve as role models, and
gain valuable experience for their future teaching careers.
Campus Compact:
Campus Compact describes itself as "a coalition of college
and university presidents who are committed to fostering
[community service] opportunities on their campuses
Campus
Compact provides information, funding and technical assistance to
member campuses; creates incentives for student involvement in
8
service by helping shape policy at the federal, state and local
levels; and promotes a national awareness of the important
resources college students offer in the public interest."
Presently 235 colleges and universities are members of Campus
Compact.
Campus Compact runs a special program, Campus Partners in
Learning, in order to promote mentoring programs in which college
students work with at-risk youth. Their research reveals that a
majority of dropouts do not lack academic ability, but rather lack
the self-confidence and support they need to complete school.
They cite the findings of the 1987 National Forum on Youth at
Risk, which identified mentoring as one of five effective ways to
help at-risk youth. (Parental involvement, early childhood
education, interagency and public/private collaborations, and
restructuring of schools are the other means the Forum
identified.) Campus Compact stresses the importance of one-on-one
mentoring relationships as a way to increase children's self-
confidence, and adds that the "greatest difference a one-on-one
relationship can make for the youth involved is in attitude, self-
esteem, and motivation, rather than exclusive attention to
academic matters."
Campus Compact has provided grants for colleges and
universities to develop model programs for mentoring; detailed
information about these programs is available in their publication
"Linking College Students and At-Risk Youth: Strategies for
Planning and Conducting Campus-Based Mentoring Programs." In this
report they draw a distinction between community service "exposure
programs" and "engagement programs,' noting the greater
effectiveness of programs that "have explicit, detailed, and
comprehensive objectives, are unswerving in their commitment to
service, are intellectually demanding, and allow time for
reflection on social problems, social policies, and personal
feelings about helping.'
In addition, Campus Compact enumerates six training and
support elements that should be provided to student mentors.
These are quoted from "At-Risk Youth and the Role of College and
University Students":
1) An orientation which clearly outlines the goals of the
program, and the expectations for student volunteers.
Students must also be encouraged to share their reasons for
participation, and their expectations for involvement.
2) An introduction to the community's culture and school
district by a youth expert from the area, such as a middle
school teacher or community agency director.
3) A lecture/discussion/workshop with a youth expert on
child development and communication techniques.
4) Ongoing (bi-weekly or monthly) get-togethers for students
to share their observations, frustrations, ideas, and
questions.
9
5) Scheduled program director/coordinator office hours so
that students know there is a time to ask questions and seek
advice.
6) A referral list of youth-related community. resources.
Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL) :
Campus Outreach Opportunity League is a national organization
run by recent college graduates and present college students in
order to promote and support student community service. COOL
staffers visit campuses to help people develop their plans for
promoting and improving student community service activities, and
COOL affiliates -- thousands of students and others from over 600
schools and 250 organizations -- and others meet in national
meetings in order to share ideas and resources. COOL also
publishes books and a bimonthly newsletter to help students and
others develop community service projects. They also run special
projects such as Mixing It Up, a program that draws upon the
diversity of people in order to strengthen community service by
utilizing the different experiences and beliefs of people from
different backgrounds. COOL also serves as an informal conduit of
information for people interested in finding out what sorts of
community service programs are being organized and participated in
by students at schools across the nation. COOL is presently
investigating ways to support a much-needed database and almanac
of student community service projects from across the nation.
Children's Defense Fund (CDF) :
The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) provides a voice for the
children of America, giving particular attention to the needs of
poor, minority, and handicapped children. CDF works to educate
the nation about children's needs and stresses the importance of
preventive action.
CDF's report "Service Opportunities for Youth" provides a
concise overview of the history of youth service and looks briefly
at present trends. It also profiles a sample of national agencies
that work on youth service issues.
The report also explores a few issues about youth service.
One important point it raises is that [t]ypically, disadvantaged
youths are thought of as recipients of service, not givers, and
that programs in which the traditional recipients become providers
are extremely valuable in building self-esteem, preventing school
drop-out, and fulfilling other goals for the recipients. One
example they list is the Valued Youth Partnership Program (VYP) in
San Antonio, Texas, a dropout prevention program for Hispanic
students. Through VYP, at-risk high school students are given the
opportunity to volunteer as tutors for younger children. VYP
tutors are trained for their positions and are involved in
fieldtrips specially designed to expose them to role models and
community opportunities.
The report ends with a warning against the risk of youth
service programs becoming exploitative of volunteers. They
explain, "for older teenagers and young adults, the distinction
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between service and employment can be blurred easily. When
service activities are used as a substitute for real job
opportunities, they can end up exploiting rather than enriching
young people." They also point out that "when large-scale service
programs, in their effort to perform useful projects in
the community, end up displacing paid employees in the public or
private nonprofit sectors, the broader public interest is poorly
served."
Florida's Office for Campus Volunteers (FOCV) :
Created by the Florida legislature to increase collegiate
involvement in community service, Florida's Office for Campus
Volunteers (FOCV) is Florida's hub for student volunteerism.
Staffed primarily by recent graduates, FOCV works with students at
over 60 colleges and universities in Florida. FOCV publishes a
newsletter and provides grants up to $1000 for Florida students to
begin new community service projects.
Maryland Student Service Alliance:
The Maryland Student Service Alliance is an example of a
state-based, public sector program to promote student service
programs. The Maryland agency initially concentrated on fostering
service among high school students. It now includes younger
students, and it is exploring ideas for a statewide college
service corps.
National Association of Student Ys:
The National Association of Student Ys can provide
information about the volunteer activities of local student Ys
throughout the nation and can search for other information through
their telecommunications network.
National Society for Internships and Experiential
Education (NSIEE) :
The National Society for Internships and Experiential
Education (NSIEE) promotes community and public service learning
as one of many ways people of all ages may learn through
experience. NSIEE publishes a newsletter and resource books,
convenes regional and national conferences, maintains a national
resource center, and provides consulting services. In addition,
NSIEE promotes ten principles of good practice, which were
developed in consultation with over 70 organizations interested in
service and learning. These principles are explained in detail in
the Wingspread special report "Principles of Good Practice for
Combining Service and Learning".
According to the Wingspread special report, an effective
program:
(1) - engages people in responsible and challenging actions
for the common good;
(2) - provides structured opportunities for people to
reflect critically on their service experience;
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(3) - articulates clear service and learning goals for
everyone involved;
(4) - allows for those with needs to define those needs;
(5) - clarifies the responsibilities of each person and
organization involved;
(6) - matches service providers and service needs through a
process that recognizes changing circumstance;
(7) - expects genuine, active, and sustained organizational
commitment;
(8) - includes training, supervision, monitoring, support,
recognition, and evaluation to meet service and
learning goals;
(9) - insures that the time commitment for service and
learning is flexible, appropriate, and in the best
interest of all involved; and
(10) - is committed to program participation by and with
diverse populations.
National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness
The Campaign, a project of the PIRG's (Public Interest
Research Groups), was launched in 1985 "to help students turn
their concern for people who are impoverished into thoughtful and
effective action.' The Campaign works with over 500 schools in 45
states to help students strengthen their organizing and leadership
skills. The Campaign and the schools in its network promote
activities such as fundraising, service, advocacy and
education/awareness raising. Special programs include a national
Hunger and Homelessness Week in November, an annual conference
each October, and the Hunger Clean-up in April. Ongoing
initiatives include SPLASH (Students Pushing for Legislative
Action to Stop Hunger and Homelessness) and Food Salvage. The
Campaign publishes a monthly newsletter called Students Making a
Difference and several resource guides.
National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) :
The National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) is a non-profit
organization affiliated with the University of Minnesota. NYLC
conducts work in youth service at both the state and national
levels. It sponsors a National Youth Leadership Project in which
over one hundred 10th and 11th graders participate each summer.
College students serve as primary leaders in this intensive
program for developing service-oriented leadership among
teenagers. Participants come to the project in teams sponsored by
schools and service agencies, and go back to their homes with
increased motivation and skills for service. Many of the projects
designed and implemented by former Leadership Project participants
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have focused on peer mentoring and other forms of youth working
with youth.
In partnership with the Minneapolis Public Schools, NYLC
works in the Summer WalkAbout Program, a collaborative program
involving families, teachers, and college, high school, and
elementary school students. The WalkAbout program's primary aim
is to improve skills and enhance self-esteem, motivation for
learning, connection to the community and social interaction in
targeted students from grades K, 2, 5, 7, and 12. These students
are involved in basic skills activities in a community based,
experiential learning atmosphere.
NYLC also publishes a seasonal newsletter and numerous books
on topics related to youth service.
Northern Rockies Action Group:
The Northern Rockies Action Group publishes a variety of
pamphlets for public interest organizations. Their guide
"Successful Internships" discusses service internship programs
from an agency's point of view, addressing issues about why to
work with interns and how to design an internship program. It
discusses the importance of providing interns with both staff and
financial support, defining the parameters of the internship, and
developing appropriate orientation, supervision, and evaluation.
The Partnership for Service Learning:
The Partnership for Service Learning defines itself as a
"consortium of colleges, universities, service agencies, and
related organizations united to foster and develop service-
learning in higher education." The partnership offers service-
oriented study abroad programs, publishes the newsletter
Action/Reflection, and consults with campus based service
programs.
Youth Service America:
Youth Service America is dedicated to promoting and
developing youth service programs for young people of all ages.
Based in Washington, DC, it works to mobilize support for youth
service projects throughout the country.
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Colleges and Universities
These are just some of the service programs at some of the
colleges and universities around the nation. These are presented
in order to provide examples of what is being done on some
campuses and what might be done on others. Most importantly,
however, these examples should serve as evidence of the creativity
and commitment of students interested in community service and as
inspiration for everyone interested in enhancing community service
throughout the nation not only to emulate successful programs but
also to create innovative programs in answer to new challenges.
Berea College, Berea, Kentucky:
Located in rural Berea, Kentucky, Berea College has a number
of unique attributes. In order to be admitted, prospective
students' economic backgrounds must place them beneath Berea's
income limit. Over half of Berea's students receive full-
financial aid. The college itself is located in a small
community, and most of the children reached by their community
service programs, like Berea students, come from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, Berea has a labor program
under which all Berea students are required to work. One work
option is to participate in community service. Many service
projects are student initiated and managed.
Through the Students for Appalachia (SFA) community service
program, students participate in a number of highly-developed
programs that provide educational assistance to younger children.
It has two tutoring programs, one which pairs roughly 100 Berea
students with children in grades K-12 for one-on-one tutoring, and
another that provides drop-in tutoring for children who do not
have a one-on-one tutor. The Learning Loft is open Monday
evenings for parents to drop their children for two hours of extra
help with school work and skills.
Students for Appalachia sponsors three group mentoring
projects, which are developed through weekly meetings between
college students, local schools, and members of the community.
KIDS (Kids Into Doing Something) works with elementary school
children, while GO (Girls Only) and TUFF (Teens United for the
Future) work with teenaged girls and boys, respectively. The
programs are designed to promote learning as a fun activity, to
build participants' self-esteem, and to expose young children to
college in an inviting way. Individual college mentors also work
with community children through the Berea Friends program.
During the summer Berea runs a Summer Day Camp program that
combines education, community service, arts and crafts, and games
for over 100 local children. About a dozen Berea students
participate as staffpeople, tutoring children and running camp
activities. The camp day begins with a half-hour of full group
activities, and then staff and campers break up into smaller
groups for computer center time, journal writing, campus recycling
walks, crafts, and other activities. Campers are recruited from
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Berea's academic year programs, and through word of mouth between
schools, guidance counselors, and parents.
Berea students participating in SFA projects attend an
overnight preparatory retreat focused on leadership, personality,
and group dynamics issues. Tutoring programs provide specialized
orientation, and weekly staff meetings provide for group cohesion,
supplemental training, and related speakers. All student
volunteers contribute to a service log, noting their activities,
the positive and negative aspects of their daily experiences, and
any additional reflections.
Among the elements that Students for Appalachia cites as
essential to effective service programs are a link with the
community, strong group communication and cohesion, developed
structure and programming, a functional site, student initiative
and leadership, a stress on reflection and self-development, and
integration of service with curriculum. SFA also notes the
importance of the support of Berea's administration in the success
of their program as a whole.
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island:
Brown's is one of a growing number of campuses around the
country with a strong public service infrastructure. Its Center
for Public Service maintains contacts and a resource library which
students, faculty and administrators use to identify local,
national, and international service opportunities. Brown
Community Outreach serves as the campus clearinghouse for
information on local volunteer opportunities.
The Center for Public Service operates an English as a Second
Language program. The Brown ESL Student Tutoring program (BEST)
provides college student volunteers to work with English language
students of all ages. The Center also offers a mentoring program
to prevent substance abuse and dropout among middle school
students who live in local public housing, an adult literacy
program, and a mentoring program with third graders.
The Center for Public Service also offers fellowships and
awards that enable students to make a prolonged commitment to
community service. One student, with support from the C.V. Starr
National Service Fellowship, spent a semester tutoring and
teaching inner-city children. Another student was awarded a
President's Community Service Fellowship to provide a summer
program for ESL children.
More detailed information about all the activities of the
Brown Center for Public Service is available in their annual
report.
University of California, Los Angeles:
UCLA has a large, diverse student body in a large, diverse
city. Students at UCLA participate in a number of different
tutorial programs, many of them based upon ethnic background.
Some of the programs run out of the UCLA Community Service
Commission office are Amigos del Barrio, the Armenian Tutorial
Project, the Asian Education Project, the Korean Tutorial Project,
and Working for Immigrant Literacy Development (WILD). Both
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Amigos del Barrio and WILD serve members of California's migrant
community.
Student volunteer projects at UCLA are also most often
student initiated and organized and student volunteers at UCLA are
often able to receive academic credit for their work in the
community. Arrangements can be made for credit through field
studies and internships programs, and many classes include field
service components.
UCLA is also a site of a Campus Compact Partners in Learning
project. The UCLA/CPIL project matches UCLA volunteers with sixth
graders who are at risk of not making the transition to secondary
school.
University of California, Santa Cruz:
As at UCLA, students at UC-Santa Cruz often receive academic
credit for service performed through field study programs, and a
number of classes incorporate service with coursework. One such
class is a section of first year composition for bilingual
students, in which students are paired with Hispanic fifth grade
pen pals. The students correspond weekly, and the Santa Cruz
instructor volunteers one day a week in the fifth grade classroom.
The fifth graders visit campus five times a year, and the Santa
Cruz students meet with their pen pals' families. One assignment
in the Santa Cruz composition class is to write bilingual books
for the fifth grade classroom. This program is an excellent
example of successful faculty initiative.
California State University, Fresno:
Through the College Ambassadors program at Fresno, migrant
college students go to lower schools in the community to promote
education. The Ambassadors spend time in Fresno schools, speak
with parents to address their concerns about children going to
college, and participate in a conference for migrant junior high
students. The Ambassadors program is in many ways the ideal
program for college student service with migrant children, as
migrant college students can provide empathy that other college
students cannot.
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York:
Two years ago faculty and staff at Cornell began a public
service network to explore questions about campus-based
volunteerism, and a public service center has just been
established on campus. Perhaps the most exciting dimension of
Cornell's service-related activities, however, is its faculty-in-
service program, which encourages faculty initiative and
involvement in student service programs.
One project initially supported by the faculty-in-service
program arranged for four Cornell students from New York City to
promote reading among children and families in Harlem. The
program identified youths through Cornell's Cooperative Extension
Nutrition Program in Harlem and arranged for the volunteers to
work at youth groups and in children's homes to encourage the idea
that reading is fun. The program aims to promote family-wide
literacy by building young children's interest in reading. The
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success of the program's first year resulted in a great demand for
more Cornell volunteers and a grant of $25,000 from a New York
based foundation.
DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana:
DePauw's 4-1-4 credit calendar lends itself to a novel
service learning program. The University Chaplain's office
oversees 18 mission programs during DePauw's winter term. Through
the Winter Term in Mission Program, students have provided
temporary full-time service to a variety of social welfare
agencies throughout the nation and world. The mission programs
send student teams with professional advisors to mission sites.
Scholarships for participants are available through the Samuel
Westerman Endowment.
One mission this winter sent a team of students to Immokalee,
Florida, where they worked with Habitat for Humanity, a temporary
shelter for homeless men and families called Friendship House, the
Redlands Christian Migrant Association, the Guadalupe Center, and
the Immokalee Child Care Center.
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina:
The Migrant Children's Education Program is only one in a
full range of student service programs at Duke. The Interns in
Conscience Program, the summer service component of the Leadership
Program, served as a model for the development of Migrant
Children's Education Program. The Interns in Conscience program
places students in ten week internships with non-profit agencies
in four cities. Programs are organized topically: New York City
interns address issues of homelessness, Washington, DC interns
work with children in crisis, Durham interns educate at-risk
children, and Atlanta interns work on health issues. Leadership
program staff and student coordinators design well-defined
internships that include mentorships with an agency staffpeople.
Prior to the internships, students take a half-credit preparatory
course taught by internship alumni and fundraise to cover summer
living expenses. During the internship period the interns live
together and participate in weekly seminars.
The Interns in Conscience Durham project, Educating At-Risk
Students, runs a summer program for at-risk youths at the Edgemont
Community Center, serving children ages 5 through 18. Interns
also volunteer with a Chamber of Commerce program that works with
high school students, developing their school and life skills and
helping to find them apprenticeships in the Durham community.
During the academic year a variety of opportunities exist for
Duke students to volunteer with Durham children in educational and
social capacities. A student service organizer volunteering with
the Durham Housing Authority has been working toward expanding a
tutoring program run in four public housing projects in order to
include African-American history, Science and Engineering, and
Computer Science components in the program. A graduate student
pursuing his Master's in Teaching coordinates an Academic
Enhancement Seminar aimed at preventing ninth graders at Durham
High from dropping out by working with them in a tutorial capacity
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in school. New Duke programs focus on literacy for hourly
employees and mentoring with employees' children.
During the spring of 1991 representatives from all of Duke's
educational service organizations joined together in an Education
Task Force. The Task Force's first project was to design and run
an orientation program for the semester's volunteers. The group
held a week-long event to raise campuswide awareness of
educational issues and volunteer opportunities.
Duke program coordinators emphasize the importance of
developing strong relationships between volunteer groups and the
agencies with which they work. A collaborative process is needed
to define goals and roles for volunteers. Student organizers also
cite the importance of avoiding territoriality and building
leadership within groups of volunteers, and they suggest allowing
as many individuals as possible to be responsible for some aspect
of the program they are working on, so as to avoid ownership and
promote strong commitments. They also stress the desirability of
providing comprehensive orientation programs for tutors and
mentors and of strengthening the link between community and
classroom activities.
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.:
A three part program to combat illiteracy has been developed
between Georgetown and Sursum Corda, a low income housing project
in Washington, D.C.. Students volunteering with the Sursum Corda
Youth Tutoring Program attend a training session, spend two hours
a week tutoring a child, and participate with the child in three
or four social events. The Georgetown University Young Scholars
program brings twenty junior high students from Sursum Corda to
campus for a twenty week Saturdays program. The teenagers are
matched with big brothers and sisters, spend three hours in
tutoring sessions each week, and participate in special projects
and field trips. A Sursum Corda Adult Literacy Program grew out
of parents' interest in learning how to read to their children.
Georgetown students provide one-on-one literacy tutoring to
parents four nights a week.
Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:
Education majors at Gettysburg can participate in Co-Star, a
service learning program designed to develop cross-cultural
sensitivity among future teachers. After taking a course in
teaching culturally different children, students can receive a
summer stipend and course credits for tutoring children in their
homes.
An experimental program began this January for Gettysburg
students to work with migrant families. Thirteen students are
visiting migrants' homes twice a week to teach English and help
the families with their other needs. Four students are receiving
college credit for their involvement.
About a decade ago a different program for Gettysburg
students to work one-on-one with migrant children was run out of
the campus Chaplain's office. Two evenings a week, 50 college
students would tutor 50 migrant children. The program stressed
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serious study during two one-hour shifts, but also created time
for social activities during a half hour break.
Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania:
Volunteer tutors from Haverford participate in a variety of
specialized programs. Some work with emotionally disabled
students, others staff Kid's Connection, a nighttime homework and
tutoring program, and still others teach English as a Second
Language through the Nationality Service Center's ESL programs.
During the summer Haverford students work with local high
school students to run a camp for children from neighboring
communities. The Serendipity camp program led to an academic year
offshoot, Crazy Critters, in which college students meet on campus
with five and six year olds twice a month to work on social
projects. Most recently, the Critters program produced a huge
mural for American troops stationed in the Persian Gulf.
Glendale Community College, Glendale, Arizona:
Strong community service programs have been developed
throughout Arizona's Maricopa Community College system. Unlike
four year colleges, where the campus is the central community for
most students, community colleges are a part of the larger
community to which their students belong. Many students have
jobs, spouses, and children; few enjoy the freedom of most four
year college student's flexible schedules. Therefore, while
public service is promoted on campuses, it is rarely initiated and
organized by students. Rather, Maricopa students often volunteer
within already existing volunteer programs in their communities.
Still, some service programs are originated at the colleges.
At Glendale Community College, one such program is the ESL/Spanish
Tutoring Project. Through this program, monolingual Spanish
speakers and monolingual English speakers work as buddies to
develop each other's second language skills.
Mesa Community College, Mesa, Arizona:
Students and professors from Mesa are among the many
volunteers who tutor through Guadalupenos United for Advancement
and Development (GUAD). A non-profit social service agency in a
community of 5000 Hispanics, Mexicans, and Native Americans, GUAD
started recruiting volunteers to tutor people of all ages in 1985.
Over seventy GUAD volunteers now tutor almost 100 members of the
Guadalupe community.
University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida:
With help from a grant from Florida's Office for Campus
Volunteers, residents of a University of Miami living group are
working with migrant children from a Homestead migrant farmworker
camp and from the Centro Campesino after school program. The
program began with a holiday program that brought fifty migrant
children to University of Miami's Apartment Area for Halloween
events. Apartment Area residents gave candy to trick-or-treaters,
painted children's faces, and set up apple-bobbing and other party
activities. The Apartment Area hosted holiday events the
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following Easter, and then decided to become more involved in the
lives of these children. They are presently developing
programs to help these children and their families through
mentorships, tutorials, and home building efforts.
Michigan State University, East Lansing. Michigan:
Students at MSU volunteer with agencies that serve the
state's large migrant population. Ties between MSU and migrant
service agencies are especially strong because of the school's
agricultural extension program nurtures strong links between the
university and its surrounding community. Many agricultural
schools and land grant universities around the country have
projects aimed at migrant populations as part of their extension
programs; these projects might provide an opportunity for student
volunteers to make a contribution to migrant communities in other
states.
State University of New York, various locations:
Field experience and internship programs have been designed
for the New York State Migrant Education Tutorial Outreach Program
(TOP). Students at State University of New York (SUNY) schools
that participate in TOP can volunteer in-school tutoring programs,
parent education, and an adolescent outreach program. By
fulfilling field experience course requirements, volunteers may
receive course credit for their work.
The interest of migrant education TOP coordinators in
participating in college student volunteer programs varies widely.
Some see college students as a great asset and express their
desire to work together with interested students, while others
prefer not to expend extra energy working with volunteers whose
personal academic schedules prevent them from making a permanent
commitment to programs. Regardless of their individual
preferences about working with college volunteers, TOP
administrators share an understanding that working with volunteers
requires a commitment of staff time, planning and support if the
volunteers are to be able to make a valuable contribution to the
program.
State University of New York, College at Brockport:
A few students from SUNY Brockport, a teacher's college, work
one-on-one with migrant students in the tutorial and outreach
programs provided at Brockport as part of the state's tutorial
outreach program for migrants. The Brockport students are work-
study workers in the migrant education program; a few students
have occasionally volunteered with the program, but volunteer
situations have not worked out well because firm commitments were
not established between the program and the volunteers.
The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
A wide range of service opportunities are available at UNC-
Chapel Hill, many through the Campus Y. Students working with the
Campus Y organize big buddy, tutoring, and dropout prevention
programs. They have developed structured activities for the
children living in a Chapel Hill apartment complex, and provided
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companions for youth offenders in Butner, North Carolina. The
Campus Y runs Project Literacy, a program that works locally with
both children and adults and that houses the national coordination
agency for the literacy movement, the Student Coalition for Action
in Literacy Education (SCALE) A new service-learning center has
just opened at UNC called APPLES (Allowing Persons to Plan
Learning Experiences in Service) which will seek to integrate
volunteer experience with the curriculum.
The University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana:
Notre Dame offers summer service projects through its Center
for Social Concerns. Since the program's inception in 1980, over
600 students have participated in a broad range of eight week
service internships with social service agencies. The program
draws heavily upon alumni support, using local alumni club funding
to provide $1400 stipends to students interning in club
communities. Students who intern in locations with small alumni
clubs receive stipends through the help of the Andrews Scholarship
Fund.
The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
Penn has a well-developed, multifaceted student service
infrastructure and experienced staff people with valuable insights
about education-oriented service programs. They stress the need
to emphasize the quality of programming over the quantity of
participants, to provide training for tutors, to define program
expectations clearly, and to continually re-evaluate programs in
order to make improvements and combat volunteer attrition. They
note the problem of discontinuity that arises when students on a
college calendar work with children in agencies on full-year or
public school calendars and suggest college break programs to
compensate for this discontinuity. Finally, they call attention
to the need for support systems for tutors, who encounter problems
such as drug addiction, housing crises, and domestic violence in
their work with young children; in order to address these
situations, or just to cope with them, education volunteers need
access to non-educational social agencies.
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey:
The Princeton University Class of 1955 has established a
Public Interest Internship Program that sponsors summer and full-
year public service internships for students and recent graduates.
Project 55 internships must meet a number of criteria, including
integration of knowledge and action, nonpartisanship, and a "focus
on changing the system rather than treating symptoms."
University of Portland, Portland, Oregon:
Students at Portland worked with a Catholic church and a
group of area farmers to improve the conditions at local migrant
camps.
Reed College, Portland, Oregon:
Students at Reed College became involved in Oregon's migrant
population when a Reed alumnae became a nurse and worked with a
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migrant health project. A few students from Reed volunteer in a
pre-natal education program that provides support to pregnant
Spanish speaking migrants. Volunteers for this project must be
women who are fluent in Spanish and who have access to
transportation. Others at Reed participated in an alternative
spring break project in which they helped rehabilitate a community
center for migrant workers in Cornelius, OR.
Stanford University, Stanford, California:
Stanford students who wish to devote their summers to public
service can qualify for $1500 grants (with supplemental funds
available for financial aid students) through the Public Service
Summer Fellowship Program sponsored by the Haas Center for Public
Service and Memorial Church. Prospective fellows submit project
proposals, which are evaluated on the basis of the need and
support for the project in the community, the feasibility of the
project, the level of interaction with the community, the level of
innovation of the project, and the qualities of the applicant.
The Stanford Literacy project reaches the area's migrant
farmworker population by providing one-on-one literacy help.
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee:
Vanderbilt University is a national leader in developing
alternative spring break projects, in which students spend their
mid-semester vacations working full-time on volunteer projects.
One recent alternative spring break project sent over twenty
students to Indiantown, Florida to work with and learn from
Guatemalan refugees who work as migrant farmlaborers. Over 200
students participated in a wide range of student-run programs.
Each program included an orientation and training period prior to
the program, a focus on community involvement during the program,
and a reorientation period for reflection and local action after
the program. Vanderbilt has written a guide to creating
successful alternate spring break programs and has published it
with COOL.
The University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont:
A broad variety of service opportunities are available at the
University of Vermont through its Center for Service-Learning and
other organizations. The Center refers students to community-
based service opportunities and serves as an umbrella organization
for a number of campus-based projects. For-credit volunteer
projects, field studies, and intensive internships can be arranged
through the Center. In addition, the University of Vermont is one
of many colleges where the Alpha Phi Omega co-ed service
fraternity, as well as other Greek organizations, participate in
community service activities.
One novel project at the University of Vermont is the Vermont
Children's Magazine. For over twenty years, UVM students have
taught creative writing and art to elementary school children in
Burlington, and have helped them create a magazine.
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West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, West Virginia:
Eight students at West Virginia Wesleyan are working in a
rural elementary school as part of a semester-long volunteer
program that has been integrated with a for-credit independent
study. The students underwent a twenty hour training that
included lessons on Appalachian culture and child development.
They spend a minimum of three hours each week with the children
with whom they have been matched. They meet at the children's
schools and homes and on campus.
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut:
Students at Yale work with the Christian Community Action
Youth program to provide year-round assistance to children from a
family shelter. The program began with a day camp in which Yale
students brought children from the shelter to local museums,
pools, and other enjoyable places. An academic year program,
similar to the summer program but requiring a smaller time
commitment, was added later.
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Three Model Organizations
We have examined the following three national
organizations in-depth because we feel they represent some of the
best methods for creating networks among student volunteers and
promoting increased student involvement in community service. Even
with small staffs and a limited budget, they are able to inspire
students, help build strong campus-based volunteer programs, serve
as a clearinghouse for information, and effectively link students
from all over the country. We hope to initiate a similar national
program to promote student involvement with farmworkers.
Break Away: The Alternative Break Connection:
During the 1986-1987 school year, students at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville created a program called Alternative
Spring Break (ASB) The concept was fairly simple. Students would
spend their school vacation engaged in service, working with
organizations that were grappling with some of the nation's most
pressing problems, such as poverty, hunger, racism, illiteracy,
environmental degradation and inadequate housing. A team of
students could work as close as the school's home town or as far
away as another country. The communities would gain from the work
performed by the students, and the students would gain an
understanding of the world around them and their role as
responsible citizens.
The Vanderbilt ASB program caught on and quickly grew, from
50 students at four sites in 1987 to over 220 students at fourteen
sites in 1991. Students at Vanderbilt discovered they were not
alone as they began to hear from schools across the country that
had similar programs, as well as many others interested in
starting alternative break programs on their campuses. In response
to numerous requests for information and technical assistance, the
staff of Vanderbilt ASB collaborated with COOL (Campus Outreach
Opportunity League) in 1990 to write a guide called Break Away:
Organizing an Alternative Spring Break. In addition, they created
a Sitebank, a computerized database of community organizations, in
order to allow schools across the nation to develop worksites with
already existing grassroots organizations.
The requests for information and help kept flooding in,
overwhelming the student volunteer staff of ASB and the staff of
COOL. In response to this demand, students at Vanderbilt decided
to create a new national organization, separate from the
Vanderbilt ASB program, aimed at promoting quality break programs.
They submitted a proposal for start-up funding to the chancellor's
office at Vanderbilt, and were granted their request. Two
codirectors were hired (both former student coordinators of ASB)
and the office of Break Away: The Alternative Break
Connection opened in June of 1991. Since that time, the staff has
established contact with 70 schools and have established firm
relationships with 40. The Sitebank has grown to include over 70
community organizations from all over the nation and world, and
linkages between campuses and communities are growing.
24
The stated mission of Break Away is "to promote service on
the local, regional, national and international levels through
break-oriented programs which immerse students in often vastly
different cultures, heighten social awareness, and advocate life-
long social action." The promotional material continues:
Break Away was created to help students, faculty, and
administrators at institutions across the country in
their efforts to create strong ASB programs that will
benefit both the students and the communities involved.
We believe there are many college students who would
like to become involved in community service, but are
daunted by what they are afraid would be a substantial
time commitment out of their busy schedules. Through an
ASB program, these students can discover the joy of
service in a way that does not interfere with their
regular academic commitments, and they re-enter the
campus environment energized and eager to become
involved on a more regular basis. In this way the
student community service movement will be further
strengthened both in numbers and in quality.
In addition to the resource guide and the Sitebank, Break
Away now offers several other services and programs. The staff
members make consultative visits to campuses which are starting a
break program or which want help improving an existing program.
Periodic regional conferences are being planned for campuses
throughout the country with a theme of "bringing it back home, " in
order to keep attention focused on the need for sustained service
in the local community. Students and members of community
organizations will come together to make new friends and contacts
and to share ideas and plans. A quarterly newsletter now links
students across the country and keeps them up-to-date with the
community service movement and break programs everywhere. One
special project developed for this year is the Nashville
Challenge, which will bring together students from six high
schools and six colleges in the Nashville area for a break program
in order to come up with a plan to make Nashville a model city for
student-community involvement. Anther special project is the
Florida Plunge, a joint venture of Break Away and Habitat for
Humanity, which will create break projects for students in the
weeks before and after the national COOL conference held in
Orlando in late February.
In addition to the two co-directors, Break Away has student
volunteers and interns working in the office and on special
projects. The organization is governed by an Advisory Board
consisting of students, community organization representatives,
university staff and administrators, with positions slotted for a
foundation representative, a media representative and two
corporate representatives. The board's functions include review of
the budget, assistance in preparing yearly agendas, decision-
making on long-range goals, representation of Break Away at
conferences and other events, and assistance with training at
regional conferences.
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Empty the Shelters (ETS) :
Empty the Shelters is an off-shoot of the National Student
Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness. After the Campaign's
1990 fall conference in Philadelphia, "Working Together in
Student-Community Partnerships", several students and staff
members of the Campaign decided to try to make that slogan more of
a reality. Two staff members, both recent graduates of the
University of Pennsylvania, decided to found Empty the Shelters to
help students move beyond direct service toward advocacy and
community organizing work. They consulted with several community-
based organizations in Philadelphia which focus on low-income
housing issues, and established contact with many homeless or
formerly homeless people as they structured the project. Together
they planned a summer experience for students from all over the
country to come to Philadelphia to work with and learn from
homeless persons and community organizers who are attacking the
root causes of homelessness.
Thirty-eight students or recent graduates from fifteen
schools came to Philadelphia for eight weeks in the summer of
1991. Each student was required to raise $500 for ETS and to
contribute $100 for his or her own housing for the summer. The
summer began with a one-week orientation, and then students began
their work with various community organizations. The students
became very involved in the work of several grassroots
organizations as well as a coalition effort to pressure the
Philadelphia Housing Authority to make changes in their policies
and programs. On-going reflection and educational activities were
an important part of the summer, and leadership development was
integrated into the program. By the end of the summer, student
participants were energized and activated by all they had seen and
done, and were ready to go back to their home campuses to put into
practice what they had learned in Philadelphia. The ETS staff will
continue to assist this first group of students in their campus
efforts as well as plan for next summer's internships in
Philadelphia. The program is considering expanding to San
Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta for the summer of 1992.
The Student Coalition for Action in Literacy Education
(SCALE) :
In the fall of 1988 two students at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill founded Project Literacy in order to link
students interested in teaching literacy skills with new learners
on the campus and in the community. A year later, in conjunction
with COOL, they decided to launch SCALE (Student Coalition for
Action in Literacy Education) and work to increase student
involvement in literacy nationwide. Through contacts from a series
of conferences, surveys and the federal Student Literacy Corp,
SCALE now corresponds with over 500 campus groups.
SCALE's mission statement summarizes their primary goals and
philosophy:
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mobilizing student involvement in literacy
building on the idealism and enthusiasm of college students
increasing literacy as a tool for the transformation of
individuals and society, as a vehicle for social justice
entitling the development of literacy skills in the
language of the learners choice
developing leadership opportunities for both college
students and new readers
creating a mutual learning process with new readers and
others involved in literacy
promoting partnerships between campuses and communities
linking the college student movement with national
organizations committed to literacy
SCALE promotes nationwide student volunteerism with literacy
through four core programs and two special projects. SCALE serves
as a national network for campus based literacy programs, conducts
site visits to help strengthen the campus based literacy movement,
maintains a database of literacy programs, and raises campus
awareness of literacy issues.
One of SCALE's special projects is the North Carolina
College Student Literacy Coalition, which is building a strong
network on the state level. In addition, the Peer Consulting
Network program will train 15 teams of student leaders to serve as
peer consultants for campuses in their own regions, in order to
localize leadership and outreach efforts. SCALE also publishes a
newsletter and other informational materials.
SCALE staff includes two co-directors (the founders of SCALE,
both 1990 graduates of UNC-Chapel Hill), an office manager and
part-time interns and volunteers. In 1991 the Summer Fellows
program was initiated to provide opportunities for students to
become more involved in organizing outreach and support programs.
SCALE is governed by a board of directors which includes literacy
experts, college students, volunteer program coordinators and new
readers. In addition, a high-profile Board of Advisors (with First
Lady Barbara Bush serving as Honorary Chair) provides support and
encouragement for SCALE's efforts.
27
THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES'
MIGRANT CHILDREN'S EDUCATION AND DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
The following section explains and evaluates the Center for
Documentary Studies' Migrant Children's Education and
Documentation Project in terms of its purpose as a student
community service project. By focusing on the volunteer aspect of
the project, it may understate the importance and value of
documentary work. Our documentary mission has been an essential
component of our work with migrant children. It has been through
entering the lives of these children and their parents, through
seeing the labor camps where they live, attending the churches
where they worship, and working with the agencies where they go
for aid--in short, through a documentary style of inquiry into
their lives, their joys and their needs--that we have discovered
how we might, as volunteers, friends, and citizens, help to
improve the quality of their lives.
All the people involved in this project have struggled with
the role of student volunteers in the lives of migrant children.
We have questioned our roles as altruistic outsiders entering a
foreign community as uninvited guests, and at times we have been
unable to reconcile our genuine desire to help with our audacity
to interfere.
We cannot deny that one of our intentions through student
volunteerism is to give something of ourselves to people with
unmet needs. We should not deny that this intention is good and
should not pretend that it is wrong for people to help other
people. Yet we also must remember that our good intentions
provide only a tenuous justification for our actions, that our
actions have implications. Good intentions are not always a
sufficient safeguard against doing harm. This warning should not
discourage us from acting, but should inform the way in which we
choose to act.
We should remember that even in our charity we are exercising
our power over others. We should strive toward relinquishing our
control to the people whose lives we seek to improve. We cannot
give migrants or anyone else any service as valuable as the self-
determination we can permit them to claim.
Many people who have worked with this project feel that more
than a service or documentary program, the migrant project is an
experiential education opportunity for college students. Without
a doubt, the program had a profound, formative impact upon the
student interns. By virtue of their experiences, the interns were
the recipients of an unique education in the lives of rural North
Carolina's migrant farmworkers. They learned lessons that cannot
be taught in a classroom, discovering for themselves what is meant
by poverty, disease, racism, deprivation, domestic violence,
addiction, and oppression, and also by pride, family, culture,
work, charity, and spirituality. The tremendous value of the
project as an experiential learning program is undeniable, but as
merely an educational laboratory the project might not be
justifiable.
A student community service project, at its best, does more
than allow volunteers to provide a service and receive an
28
education in return. At its best, it is an opportunity for a
young person to share in the lives of others, to become part of a
group of people with common interests, and to join in building a
stronger community. Someone who participates in a student
community service project may be thought of as one who learns by
working with a diverse group of people united by a common purpose
to provide for people's needs. There are no clearly defined
providers and recipients in such a project; rather, there are
simply people working together, sharing in their accomplishments.
This is one ideal for student volunteerism, one toward which
we have not always strived, but one which we have occasionally
achieved. The interns who participated in the Migrant Children's
Education and Documentation Project care deeply about this ideal,
as deeply as they care for the farmworker families with whom they
spent their summers. While the rest of this section may focus
upon the notion of utilizing student volunteers to help meet the
educational or other needs of migrant farmworkers and their
families, the greater potential for student community service
projects should not be forgotten.
Pre-Internship Planning and Logistical Concerns
Initiation of the Project:
The Migrant Children's Education and Documentation Project
began nearly a year before the first student interns began their
summer work in the farmworker communities of rural North Carolina.
In the late summer and autumn of 1989, the Center for Documentary
Studies explored the ways in which Duke student volunteers could
help meet the educational needs of migrant children. When the
Center decided upon an intensive ten week summer internship
program in which Duke student interns would work with migrant
education agencies, the Executive Director and staff assistant
immediately began contacting school administrators in the Johnston
and Sampson County, North Carolina public schools and the East
Coast Migrant Head Start Program. A Duke alumnus with experience
organizing summer service-learning internships through Duke's
Interns in Conscience Program and with familiarity with rural
North Carolina was called upon to consult on the planning and
design of the program. In addition, a student with experience as
both a participant and organizer of the Interns in Conscience
program was brought on as a student organizer.
Recruitment:
The 1990 summer interns were recruited mainly by word of
mouth. The program organizers spread word of the program to
people they knew were interested in teaching, people who spoke
Spanish, and people who had a strong interest in community service
and experiential learning. Sixteen people initially expressed
their intentions to participate in the program, and all but two of
them became summer interns.
29
For the 1991 summer internships, we recruited through
advertising in the student newspaper, posting flyers, and making
presentations to students in education, Spanish, and other related
classes. Out of over forty people who initially expressed
interest, eight ended up participating in the summer internships.
Several factors contribute to this high attrition rate. Students
at Duke explore many different options for the summer, and many
are unable to afford to volunteer for the summer and/or are
intimidated by the idea of raising their own funding.
Only some students are able to cover their living expenses through
their fundraising efforts, and many need to be able to contribute
from summer earnings to the cost of college tuition.
Preparing the Interns: The House Course
Also during the fall semester of 1989, members of the migrant
project team designed the syllabus for a spring semester house
course, a half-credit class taught by a student under the
supervision of Dr. Coles. The course, "Migrant Farmworker
Children, Education, and Documentary Studies, was designed to
serve as a classroom introduction and preparation for the summer
internship. In addition to readings and short written
assignments, the class required students to volunteer with local
agencies serving children. The weekly class was limited to the
fourteen students committed to participating the internships and
all were required to attend.
The work-study student helping to organize the project took
primary responsibility for the running and teaching of the spring
1990 house course. In addition to leading weekly discussions, she
was responsible for logistical matters, such as finding a meeting
place for the class, arranging for weekly speakers, organizing a
trip to Smithfield, and generally responding to students'
questions and concerns about the summer program. The Center's
staff assistant offered considerable help in completing these
tasks. While the work study student served as the primary contact
for the students, the Center staffperson served as the official
link between the students and the Center.
The spring of 1991 house course, called "Migrant Farmworkers
in North Carolina", was led by two former interns, one a recent
graduate and the other a Duke senior. The two served as co-
coordinators of the entire project and together took
responsibility for recruiting interns, planning the class, working
with the sponsoring organizations to make intern placements,
helping interns fundraise for their living expenses, and locating
housing for the summer. The recent graduate served as the official
link between the students and the Center for Documentary Studies
during the semester, and the senior took over upon her graduation
and served as the liaison and coordinator throughout the summer.
The 1991 house course was redesigned to make it much more
practical for the interns, and incorporated what we had learned
from our experiences the previous summer. Lengthy reading
assignments were cut down to a more manageable size, and other
readings more applicable to the migrant situation in North
Carolina were included in the syllabus. The coordinators also
located several relevant films and videos for the class to view.
30
Speakers came from the various organizations where interns would
be spending the summer, and were able to provide a much more
realistic picture of migrant life, the important issues facing
farmworkers, and the work being done by service providers and
advocates. The class was open to both interns and non-interns, and
a total of over twenty interested undergraduate, graduate students
and even a Duke instructor participated.
Although the second house course was greatly improved, some
additional changes may be made for next spring. The 1991 interns
felt that the class gave them an excellent policy preparation, in
some cases making them better informed than the staff of the
agencies where they worked. However, several students commented
that they would have liked to have met or heard from farmworkers
themselves before the summer, and perhaps have had a local farmer
come to give his or her perspective. One field trip had been
arranged in the previous spring to visit a farm near where the
interns would be working, but few interns were able to attend.
The value of field trips out to the camps, farms or agencies
was not agreed upon by all former interns. Some felt it would be a
great improvement upon the class, while others commented that
"nothing can really prepare you for your first visit to a labor
camp" and argued that the class worked best as currently designed:
an introduction to the major concerns of farmworkers and to the
agencies available to assist them. In addition, many students are
not able or willing to take time on a weekend during the school
term to take field trips. In conclusion, it seems that these
opportunities should be available to interested students, but not
required. However, every effort should be made to bring
farmworkers or former farmworkers to speak to the students, and to
bring in the perspective of the farmers. We expect the class will
continue to be improved annually with the new ideas of each group
of returning interns.
The Center sponsored the house courses not only because we
felt it was important for future interns to be familiar with the
problems faced by migrant farmworkers, but also because we felt it
was important to link community action with reflective thought.
Our idea was not simply to apply learning to real life situations,
but to accustom students to reflecting on the service they perform
and to thinking about the situations they discover.
Housing:
Finding temporary housing for a group of college students in
rural North Carolina proved to be one of the most challenging
aspects of organizing the internships for both summers. The ideal
we sought was an inexpensive form of housing that would be
convenient to the agencies where the interns would work, that
would both house all the interns in one location and provide them
with some measure of privacy, and would be comfortable during a
hot North Carolina summer. For the summer of 1990, the project
coordinators contacted realtors, answered advertisements in local
newspapers, negotiated with area motels, and called upon personal
contacts from churches and other organizations in the area. It
proved important for representatives of the Center to meet
31
personally with potential housing providers in order to calm the
fears they seemed to have about renting to college students.
Ultimately, arrangements were made for the 1990 interns to
live at the Short Journey Center in Smithfield, a religious
retreat center that provided most of the basic amenities the
interns desired. The students lived barracks-style in two bunk-
bed furnished, air conditioned "bedrooms". While they lacked
personal space, they did have air conditioning and ample bathroom
facilities.
The major problem with living at the Short Journey Center was
its distance from the agencies where the interns wound up spending
most of their time, with the exception of the Shiloh Head Start
program in Smithfield. Half the interns did not own cars and were
constantly frustrated by their difficulty in finding
transportation to and from agencies at the times they wanted to
go.
For the summer of 1991, coordinators and interns decided to
try to find rental housing closer to Newton Grove and Benson,
where all of the interns would be working. (The Smithfield Shiloh
program is no longer an East Coast Migrant Head Start grantee.)
Sponsors were contacted, newspapers were searched, and realtors
consulted for any leads. Several fairly large houses were located,
but the owners proved unwilling to rent for just three months.
Finally, we contacted the Office of Residence Life at Campbell
University in Buies Creek, which agreed to rent dorm spaces to the
interns. The women were housed in a big, beautiful air-
conditioned former home, but due to Campbell's single-sex living
assignment policy, the men had to live in a different dorm. While
the housing itself was certainly acceptable and affordable, it
would be better for the entire group to be able to live together.
In addition, the interns once again had to travel long distances
(15-25 miles) to get to work. However, the coordinators had
stressed the importance of having a car, and each intern was
fortunate enough to have his or her own transportation for the
summer. We may never find the ideal situation of having a group
house (or two) close to the agencies in Newton Grove, but we will
continue to search.
Intern Placements:
Quite ironically, the choice of housing at the Short Journey
Center was a major factor in determining where the interns would
volunteer the first summer. Initial contact had been made with
child care and public school programs in both Johnston and Sampson
Counties; when housing was chosen in Johnston County, within ten
miles of the Shiloh Head Start program, it seemed clear that it
would be most convenient for the interns to work primarily with
Johnston County organizations. Meetings were arranged with the
administrators of the Shiloh Migrant Head Start program and the
Johnston County Public Schools Migrant Summer School Program.
Neither program had previous experience working with a group of
college volunteers, but both welcomed the opportunity to have
interested, energetic young people working with them. The
organizers and administrators discussed the possible roles interns
might play with each agency, as classroom aides, subject leaders,
32
recruiters, or other kinds of assistants, but specific decisions
about intern duties were left for the summer.
Our experiences during the first internship summer taught us
that the Center, the interns, and the agencies we work with need
to collaborate better on establishing the precise roles student
volunteers will play within agencies. An inordinate amount of
time and frustration was exhausted during the summer because
interns' responsibilities were not clearly defined at the outset.
It was also decided that education, health and legal services
agencies can help volunteers be more effective by providing brief
training sessions.
Another problem with placements the first summer was created
by the reduction in funding for the public schools migrant
education program. The director was forced to cut two weeks off
the formerly six-week program. When the interns arrived in
Johnston County, they learned of this change and those students
planning to work in the public school began to look for other
opportunities for the six weeks until the school program started.
Many volunteered at the health clinic, legal services program and
through individual tutoring efforts.
Because of the positive experiences the first summer's
interns had working through the Tri-County Community Health Center
and Farmworkers Legal Services, these were expanded to become
full-time placements in the summer of 1991. In addition, the
uncertainty over the future of the Shiloh Head Start program,
which ultimately did lose its migrant funding, precluded using
that center as a site for intern placements. Interns were thus
initially offered the options of working for the health and legal
services programs for ten weeks, or spending six weeks with these
programs and four weeks with the public school program. In late
spring, we learned that a new East Coast Migrant Head Start center
was to open in May next door to the health clinic in Newton Grove.
One intern decided to work at this new center in addition to her
work at the public school program. In all, four interns worked at
the health clinic, three worked with the legal services program,
three with the public schools, and one with the Head Start
program, with several of the students working at more than one
agency. Because many of the 1990 interns felt that they had
"spread themselves too thin" we recommended to the second group
that they focus their energy on working with farmworker families
through only one or two agencies. Again, interns found ways to
informally involve themselves with farmworkers through individual
tutoring, religious programs, and social activities.
Orientation:
In addition to the house course preparation, the 1991
coordinators decided it would be helpful for the interns to have a
short on-site orientation to learn their way around the counties
where they would be working and to visit all the agencies which
work with farmworkers. The interns spent the first two days
engaged in these activities. In addition, they were able to visit
another Duke student's family farm and take tours of tobacco,
cotton, cucumber and sweet potato fields. For most students who
33
had grown up in urban or suburban environments, this day was an
important education in itself.
In addition to the group orientation, each agency provided
an orientation for its interns, ranging from one day to a week.
This training helped clarify intern responsibilities and helped
the interns more easily fit into the on-going work of the
organizations.
Funding:
Funding has been the single greatest concern for prospective
interns and Center staff. The first summer, interns had to raise
money individually in order to be able to support themselves
during the summer. Many turned to hometown civic organizations,
churches, and family friends for financial backing, while others
have drawn upon personal savings and family support. Three
students who qualified for work-study funds earned money by
working for the Center. The 1990 group's $2500 housing expenses
were paid by the Head Start program through an agreement arranged
by Center staff. The 1991 interns were again expected to raise
funds for the summer, which several were able to do through
individual contacts. In addition, the group was fortunate to learn
in April of the generous support from the US Department of
Education to cover their living and traveling expenses. However,
the award came too late for those students who originally
expressed interest but were forced to drop-out because of the lack
of funds.
While some students at Duke have been able to participate in
the internship program despite a lack of financial support, many
students have been deterred. Representatives from other colleges
and universities who have expressed great interest in starting
programs similar to ours have raised concerns that students at
their schools do not have the same resources as Duke students and
would not be able to garner enough support to finance a summer
internship. A federally sponsored national program could enable a
great many more students, particularly those with financial needs,
to participate in summer service projects than are able to do so
currently.
The 1990 and 1991 Summer Internships
The following account describes in more detail the
experiences of the student interns during the summers of 1990 and
1991. It examines the role agencies play in meeting the needs of
migrant families and evaluates the contribution student volunteers
were able to make through their work in these programs. The
evaluations and comments of interns and sponsors are included as
well as excerpts from interviews done with some of the migrant
students themselves. In a later section we will examine more
closely the needs of migrant children and of the education
programs that serve them. For an additional perspective on the
internship program, see our half-hour video, "Into the Fields,"
which documents the interns' experiences in the summer of 1991 and
34
will be used by other colleges to recruit students to participate
in similar projects.
East Coast Migrant Head Start Project:
During the summer of 1990, all fourteen interns spent time at
the Shiloh Migrant Head Start Center in Smithfield, North
Carolina, a grantee of the Arlington-based East Coast Migrant Head
Start Project. This proved to be a somewhat unfortunate time for
the Center to initiate a relationship with this program, as it was
under close scrutiny from the Arlington headquarters for many of
the very problems observed by the interns during their time there.
One of the biggest problems was that the center was trying to
serve too many children--the demand for day care is so great--and
in doing so, the center compromised the standards of care rightly
required by the East Coast Migrant Head Start project. At the end
of our first summer, we heard that the status of the Shiloh center
as an East Coast Migrant Head Start grantee was in question, and
during the winter it was confirmed that their migrant funding
would be discontinued. At the last minute, part of the funding
became available for a new center in Newton Grove, sponsored by
the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, called St. Martin's
Children of the Land East Coast Migrant Head Start. One Duke
intern spent the majority of her time with this program. Her
experiences showed a great improvement over the previous summer at
Shiloh, both in terms of the quality of the services provided to
the children and the ability of the program to incorporate student
interns. As this experience proved to be extremely positive we
plan to continue to place interns at St. Martin's.
The volunteers worked as classroom assistants, translators,
bus supervisors and recruiters at the Head Start centers. In the
classroom, their responsibilities included assisting with
activities such as songs, games, arts and crafts, music, and
reading. They helped supervise children in the lunchroom, on the
playground and on the long early morning and late afternoon
busrides. Several interns accompanied the social services
coordinator on her visits to parents and efforts to find new
eligible children. Other interns accompanied children to the
doctor's office. One student drew a series of creative new visual
aides which brightened the classroom and cafeteria walls.
One of the problems during the summer of 1990 was the lack of
clarity in the interns' roles at Head Start. Often interns found
themselves pulled from one room to another to fill in for staff
who were out for the day or out for an hour. The classroom
caregivers seemed uninformed about the purpose of the interns'
stay and this created certain tensions between some teachers and
interns. Often interns wondered whether they were truly wanted and
needed, although they could see the need for more individual
attention to the children. This experience taught us the
importance of having the sponsoring organization let their own
staff know about the internships and the need for all staff
members to have input on how best to involve the interns in their
work. In addition, more formal introductions should be made
between the interns and staff at the start of the program.
35
The interns certainly had some impact on both the children
and the Head Start centers. For three year olds in an overcrowded
classroom, they were the extra person who sometimes sat down to
read a book with one of them. They brought fresh enthusiasm to
the classrooms, and they showered the children with encouragement
and attention. For overburdened staff people, the interns were
extra hands to help them cope with whatever situations arose. For
the interns themselves, working at Head Start provided a valuable
way to work with and grow to love a group of young children. In
addition, interaction between the staff at the centers and the
interns, especially during the second summer, proved valuable to
both. The following remarks from evaluations done by the director
and staff at St. Martin's illustrate some of these benefits.
I think it's a great program. It hasn't just been
free labor; it's been a very active exchange of
ideas and backgrounds.
The students have a great impact on our
organization because the children love to be around
the students. I wish the students were able to
stay the whole season. They help this organization
a lot.
[The intern] has had a very profound impact on our
organization. She has improved the quality of care
we are able to provide, not just because of her
caring attitude, but because the adult-child ratio
was improved, allowing individual attention to each
child. She also worked extremely well with the
other caregivers and set a good example, because of
her dedication and work ethic. She may not realize
it, but she has made a very positive permanent
impression on every child she has worked with.
The interns also learned from their experiences at Head
Start. Few had worked with very young children before and they
gained a great deal of experience in early childhood education.
Most were surprised at how much they enjoyed the time they spent
with the children. Others learned more specific lessons, such as
the one described below:
Success came gradually. I began this internship
with a patience level of zero. I wanted the
toddlers to play what I was playing and to keep the
magic markers on the table. I soon learned after
much frustration that it was okay if they colored
on the floor and the table. I learned not to pick
them up and try to make them do something. In
short, I learned to be more patient.
36
Benson Public School Migrant Summer School Program:
Interns were able to make a large contribution to the migrant
summer school program through the one-on-one attention they gave
students, the special art, computer, and physical education
classes they ran, and the relationships they developed with the
students. The interns who worked as teaching assistants in the
classrooms offered extra attention and support to the younger
children, while they were able to relate with the older children
and act as role models. Many of the teacher-intern relationships
were strained, however; while some teachers worked well with
junior assistants and appreciated their input, others felt their
authority challenged and their domain invaded by classroom
volunteers.
All the interns and teachers agreed that a particularly
important contribution interns made to the program was through the
special programs they offered in the summer of 1990. The migrant
students simply would not have had an art class, a computer class,
and a physical education class if interns were not there to
organize and run them. The program was too short, due to budget
cuts, for the classroom teachers to cover all the academics and
plan for additional special activities. In addition, these funding
cuts prevented the director from being able to hire separate
teachers for the various activities. The interns who led the
special classes enjoyed autonomy, and the teachers' roles were not
challenged. In 1991, however, the interns were most desperately
needed as teacher's assistants with the two youngest classes,
which were very large. The special classes were not able to be
offered. Hopefully, in future summers we will have sufficient
numbers of interns to run an art, physical education, and computer
program as well as provide extra hands in the classroom.
In their evaluations, the teachers stressed the special
benefits provided by interns, particularly the one-on-one
attention provided to the children, their ability to serve as
positive role models, the provision of special programs and the
addition of fresh ideas, enthusiasm and energy. These qualities
are evidenced in the following remarks from the staff member's and
director's evaluations:
I learned from the volunteers, and I think they learned
from us. Everything can sound good on paper, but nothing
beats HANDS-ON experience. Migrant children need a lot
of love, encouragement, self-building activities, and
some success-oriented motivating work. They need hugs
and people who really care about helping them become the
best that they can be. Volunteers who are willing to
give of themselves freely are vital to a program such as
ours. We cannot possibly meet all the needs, but the
more caring hands we have working together for the good
of the migrant children in Johnston Co, the more hugs
and love we can give, the more teaching will be done--
and more learning will occur.
37
They were delightful, full of energy, creative,
respectful, eager to learn and willing to help. They
help meet the goals for these children not just
educationally but in all ways.
I think by just having volunteers at our school is a
good influence on the migrant kids, because these are
young men and women and they can relate to the kids.
I have worked with the Duke interns for two years and
both have been very pleasant experiences. The students
seemed aware of the work level, fast pace, and limited
time so they rolled up their sleeves and worked hard. So
far your interns have been super people. Thanks!
The migrant students themselves seemed to appreciate the
extra attention and interest of the interns. The experience proved
to be the first contact many of the migrant students had had with
college students. In interviews done with fourteen migrant
students in the Benson program in the summer of 1991, several
described the benefits of having the interns in their school
program.
Lately, the college students from Duke have been
coming here and they're really interesting to talk
to and get to know. You sort of have an idea of
what it's like to go to college and you give
yourself more goals to shoot for--Age 15
They're fun to talk to. They help you on stuff you
don't understand. The college students, even if you
don't need help, they ask you instead of waiting
for you to ask them, to make sure you understand.- --
Age 13
The college students were more special than the
other teachers. They tutor us, and tell us about
drugs, you know, not to do drugs. And they help you
a lot, they always be in back of us, telling us to
stop doing things and to do things. Age 12
They talk to us. When we'd be walking down the
halls they'd stop and talk to us about what you are
doing here and how it is in college and stuff. So
they told us how it was, how sometimes it was hard
but sometimes you do fun stuff. They can help us by
just talking to us about what we're doing and
asking us questions about what we are doing and
stuff--Age 13
I like it when someone works with me one-on-one
because you feel more secure about yourself, about
the questions you're asking, because even if you
38
ask a really dumb question, no one's going to laugh
at you. Age 15
The interns also gained from their work at the public school.
We would like to share one of their comments below:
I learned a lot about the actual migrant situation.
I feel incredibly more informed, and it's also made
me think much more seriously and concretely about
the state of education in this country, not just
for migrant children but for all children. It's
stuff I care a lot about but now I know more first-
hand what it's really like.
Not everything went perfectly, of course. The evaluations
also indicated several areas where improvement is needed in the
internship program at the public schools. For example,
relationships with some teachers were described as "not the best"
during the first summer, and the short time period of the program
did not give people time to work out the problems. It became clear
that the needs of the teachers and the needs and skills of the
interns should be more carefully examined for future placements.
In addition, it was suggested that more time be available for
teachers and interns to work together on planning activities for
the students.
Interns could be particularly helpful in working with
children who have limited English abilities. Since very few of the
teachers or staff members know any Spanish, the interns were
particularly helpful for the younger children who knew no English
at all. Even the older children, who were fluent in oral ability
could use extra ESL tutoring in reading and writing. Interns
should have some training in teaching ESL, if possible.
Several teachers noted that it would be helpful for interns
to have a background in education. One suggested a brief course
in areas such as tutoring techniques and discipline strategies. In
the future, more effort should be made to recruit students from
education classes, or who are on their way to becoming certified
to teach.
The director also noted that interns need to be better
prepared on what to expect, both on the positive and negative
side. "Idealism in the interns is highly desirable," she writes,"
but it needs to be tempered with some 'real-world' common sense.'
Overall, the experiences at the public school program proved
to be positive for the overburdened teaching staff, the migrant
children in need of individual attention, and the college
volunteers who gained new skills, new perspectives, and new
friends. The problems are ones which can be worked out with
clearer communication and a greater effort to prepare interns for
work in the classroom.
39
Tri-County Community Health Center:
Many interns went to a migrant camp for the first time as
outreach volunteers with the Tri-County Community Health Center.
Administering health questionnaires and testing blood pressure,
they saw the physical impact of migrant farm labor on people's
bodies. High blood pressure, heart disease, substance abuse and
diabetes were commonplace, as were skin diseases and infections.
Interns learned of the spread of AIDS in the migrant population
through infected tattooing needles and prostitution, and some went
to migrant camps as AIDS prevention instructors. Often, outreach
for the purposes of health screenings or AIDS education introduced
interns to farmworkers with whom they would later become friends.
Other interns became an important addition to Tri-County's
Prenatal Care Program, by teaming up with pregnant women to make
sure they could get to their health and social services
appointments. More than anything, the interns were able to offer
support and companionship to the pregnant women, who may have
lived in a camp filled mostly with men and who were often left
home alone (when they were fortunate enough not to have to work in
the fields). Friendships were also formed through this program.
In the summer of 1991, one intern worked with the Substance
Abuse Prevention Program at Tri-County. He was primarily
responsible for organizing a weekend recreation program for area
farmworkers, particularly the single males, many of whom are
stranded in labor camps all weekend with nothing but alcohol and
drugs to help pass the time. The idea of having a recreation
program had been discussed for several years, but the overburdened
staff at the clinic would not have been able to make it happen
without the help of this Duke intern. He enlisted the support of
local churches and civic groups in providing food, funding, and
sporting equipment. Transportation to the clinic from the labor
camps was provided by the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry bus. The
program was a huge success, with participation growing each week,
hitting over 60 for several weeks. Two Sundays a month workers
came to the clinic lawn to play soccer, basketball and volleyball,
as well as ping pong, cards, dominos, checkers and other board
games for the less athletically inclined. Farmworkers and
volunteers together enjoyed grilled hotdogs and watched movies.
The other two Sundays, farmworkers went on field trips, to places
such as a baseball game and the state fair. This project is a
perfect example of the type of impact an intern could have in a
farmworker service organization, in increasing the capacity for
additional special programs that help meet farmworkers' real
needs. One of the farmworker participants had these eloquent words
to say about the recreation program:
We all enjoyed the game as well as the trip. We are
very happy to know that there is people who care,
and look upon us as people also. It' people like
you who give us hope and motivation to strive for a
better way in life. [The clinic staff} is a group
of fun-loving and true caring people. They have
made it possible for many camps to come together.
We are happy to be part of the program
life
40
was boring here before they started this program.
Now we all have something to look forward to doing,
as well as meeting new people
The interns learned from both farmworkers and the staff of
the clinic, many of whom became role models and mentors to interns
considering careers in public service of some sort. The following
comments from interns evidence the kind of growth and learning
that happened over the summer.
My time at the clinic was wonderful. I have never
had such an enlightening and incredible summer. The
clinic's greatest strength is the people that work
here. To me, they are heroes. I have never met so
many people with such a great attitude about the
service they perform. Certainly part of the payment
they receive comes from the experiences they gain;
the perspective on life they learn from the
patients; the stories of struggle and perseverance
they witness.
I feel like I have learned so much through the
internship, and it is only the beginning, Through
this experience I have found much greater courage
to help others.
The interns' sponsors (or "mentors") at the clinic found the
relationship rewarding as well, as described in their comments
below:
The Duke interns were very useful in maintaining highly
efficient communication with the migrants, serving as a
liaison with local agencies on behalf of this
population.
I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the interns. I also
enjoyed watching them grow through this experience.
He was a creative, resourceful and tireless worker. He
exceeded our expectations as an intern, especially as
regards to the amount of involvement with the program
and with farmworkers.
The problems mentioned by the clinic staff included a desire
to have all the staff know about the interns' visit in advance,
and hear more about the purpose of the program. Several staff
members were concerned about the documentary aspect of the
program, as they did not want representatives of the clinic taking
pictures in migrant camps. In the future, decisions should be
clarified in advance as to the role of documentary work for those
interns who will be working at the health clinic.
One mentor mentioned that she would like to have some say in
which intern was placed with her. We may ask students and mentors
41
to meet before the final placements are made. It was also
suggested that more special projects could be created for interns
to work on (such as the recreation program). Finally, the staff
stressed the importance of Spanish-speaking ability for interns to
be able to communicate with all the patients.
Farmworkers Legal Services of North Carolina:
At Farmworkers Legal Services, student volunteers served as
translators, transportation providers, outreach workers, and
office assistants. Through this work they were exposed to the
legal problems migrants face. Men came to the office when the
terms of their employment were not met. Women came with babies in
their arms when their crewleader tried to evict them illegally.
Truckloads of migrants who had travelled to the area only to find
that the work they were promised had been given to someone else
came to find out their options.
Because the 1990 interns volunteered at the last minute,
when they learned of the reduced time of the public school
program, the FLS staff had not had time to prepare projects for
the interns, and all too often interns found themselves sitting in
an office with little to do.
This situation was greatly improved in the summer of 1991.
The staff expected the interns and prepared an excellent two-day
orientation at both the Raleigh and the Newton Grove offices.
Interns were fully incorporated into outreach teams, and worked on
several special projects, such as developing informational
material on programs available to abused women and helping to put
together a discrimination case against the Department of Motor
Vehicles. The internship at FLS proved an excellent way for
interns to meet farmworkers and better understand the many legal
problems they face. The ability of all three interns to speak
Spanish was important for this placement, as much of their work
involved communicating with clients in Spanish and translating for
clients at various other agencies.
The staff at Farmworkers Legal Services emphasized the
important role interns could play in their organization:
By providing transportation and translation for
clients, the range of services we offer is
broadened. We are able to do outreach to many more
farmworkers by including students on outreach
teams. Students' ability and willingness to do
routine tasks frees our professional staff to
concentrate on more technical or specialized work.
Students bring fresh energy to our office. They
also have time to establish relationships with
clients which helps to make a busy office seem less
impersonal to clients.
One of the interns, who is now considering a career in law,
describes her summer work at FLS:
42
I have gained great respect for the agency I worked
with and had a fantastic summer. I learned from the
actual experiences in labor camps and from talking
to people. However, being at FLS and seeing how it
operates and attempts to change situations through
advocacy has been another large part of my
learning.
Through their work at both Farmworkers Legal Services and the
Tri-County Community Health Clinic, interns were able to learn
about and help to address the many non-educational problems that
have an effect upon the education of migrant children. Time after
time, the interns witnessed the ways in which poverty,
homelessness, poor health, and other conditions that are too often
a part of migrancy adversely affected migrant children's
educational progress. The educational problems of migrant
children are inextricably linked to the other adverse conditions
in their lives. Only limited progress can be made in alleviating
migrants' educational difficulties without addressing their other
problems.
Individual Tutoring:
In addition to the educational work the interns did through
migrant education agencies, a few interns arranged through the
Benson schools migrant recruiter to tutor families in their homes.
The interns who tried to tutor children individually often found
their efforts to be futile. They had no formal materials, and
their tutees were very easily distracted in their home
surroundings. Their educational contributions were limited to
helping their tutees improve their English pronunciation and
explaining the meaning of English phrases.
Some of the interns who wanted to tutor resigned themselves
instead to spending time with their tutee families and simply
getting to know each other. While their original educational
intentions were left unfulfilled, their newfound friendships were
greatly valued.
If student interns have experience tutoring and have
instructional materials to use, they might be able to make
significant educational progress with migrant children as
individual tutors. Student interns might also teach English as a
Second Language to the many adult migrants who do not speak, read,
or write English. Even if they are not able to make much progress
teaching skills in migrants' homes, however, interns should
venture out of educational agencies and into migrants' homes when
they are welcomed. Both interns and migrants stand to gain from
the social learning that can take place through these experiences.
Post-Internship:
After an intensive immersion experience such as this, student
interns need to reorient themselves to a non-internship lifestyle.
We did not plan any formal reorientation program to help the 1990
interns reassimilate into college life or to facilitate continued
reflection. Rather, the former interns' friendships provided them
43
with a natural support network, and work on internship-related
documentary projects provided an outlet for creative reflection.
After the 1991 internships, interns were asked to reflect
upon their experiences through a written evaluation form. Upon
their return to school in September, a half-day retreat was
organized for the returning interns from the migrant project in
conjunction with the Interns in Conscience Program. This time
provided interns with a chance to share their stories with
students who had witnessed similar events, and to think and
discuss how to further their interest and involvement in community
service work. One student is writing about his experiences
through an independent study class with one of the Center's
associates, documentary novelist Lee Smith.
The former interns are currently meeting to plan for a third
summer of internships with farmworkers in eastern North Carolina.
This year, the Center has decided to co-sponsor the internship
program with the Interns in Conscience Project of the Leadership
Program, a part of Duke's Institute for Policy Sciences and Public
Affairs. The migrant project will be one of five internship sites
where students work in organizations that seek to assist
impoverished and powerless individuals and families. The other
sites and topics include the homeless in New York City, at-risk
children and youth in Washington, D.C. and Durham, and health care
in Atlanta. Dr. Coles will remain the advisor to the migrant
project. In addition, the Center will provide opportunities for
students on any of these programs to explore documentary methods.
Lessons from Our Internship Project:
Through our experiences organizing and participating in the
migrant internship project at Duke, we have learned many important
lessons about the role of college students volunteers in migrant
education and other service agencies. For the details on what we
learned about organizing such a project, please see our resource
manual. Several dominant themes have appeared in the previous
descriptive section, which are summarized below.
First, we must stress the importance of good communication
among all parties involved in such a project. Expectations should
be realistic and clear. The internship coordinators and the
agencies that sponsor interns should meet long before the summer
to discuss their goals for the program, what specific roles the
interns will play, and what will be expected or required of the
interns, in terms of skills needed, the time commitment and types
of talks to be performed. Any staff who will be working with the
interns should be involved in this process. The needs of the
farmworker population should be of foremost concern, and to the
extent possible farmworkers themselves should be included in the
planning process. Throughout the summer, the coordinators should
keep in close contact with both sponsors and interns to ensure
that the program is working out to everyone's satisfaction.
Preparation for the summer is also important for both the
interns and the organizations where they will be working. The
house course has proved to be an excellent way to introduce
students to the problems facing farmworkers and to the various
farmworker service providers and advocates. In the future, we will
44
include more farmworkers and farmers in the class, to provide more
diverse perspectives. The organizations themselves should plan
brief orientation sessions for the interns to help acquaint them
with the work of the organization and facilitate early
involvement.
In addition, we learned that students should make an effort
to learn certain skills before the internship begins. To be most
effective, interns should have some Spanish-speaking ability. For
those students interested in working in the schools, some
background in education is desirable, particularly in teaching
English as a Second Language.
45
The Needs of Migrant Children
This section consolidates the observations about migrant
children and their educational needs as observed by the interns,
the teachers, other service agency sponsors, and the migrant
children themselves.
Very early in the first summer two interns spent a day doing
outreach work with the Shiloh Migrant Head Start Child Development
Center. They drove across Johnston County with Shiloh's outreach
coordinator, searching for vans with Florida license plates and
tattered children's clothing left to dry on a line, any clues to
tell them where there might be migrant children eligible to enroll
in the Head Start program.
After enrolling a few children in the program, they stopped
at the home of a family that had been sending their children to
Head Start unwashed and in the same clothing over a period of
weeks. They found that the family lived in a ramshackle shanty
where the electricity had been disconnected. The parents were not
home. Presumably, they were both working in the fields, perhaps
nearby, perhaps as far as fifty miles away. Two children were
there, however: a six year old girl, herself a graduate of the
Head Start program, had been left to take care of her one year old
baby brother. When the interns arrived they found the baby sick
with diarrhea sitting in a sweltering room drinking sour milk.
This experience was a jolting introduction to the lives of
migrant children in rural North Carolina. In the heat of summer
many migrant infants and children live in makeshift homes with
little or no ventilation, often without indoor plumbing, sometimes
without electricity. They sleep in crowded rooms on torn
mattresses, and a few have only one set of hand-me-down clothes.
Crowded and noisy living conditions make it difficult for children
to do homework. They have no permanent home, and only temporary
schools and temporary friends.
Most migrant children have the very best lives their parents
can provide for them. The migrant parents we met were very
concerned about their children's educations, and, like parents
everywhere, would do all they could to help their children
succeed. Most of the children we interviewed reported that their
parents talked to them about school, encouraging them to study
hard and do their best to have an education. One child noted:
"They ask me how was my day, what was I doing, and do I have any
trouble with my work, 'cause they really want me to move up in the
world like most black people."
Their children have high aspirations for themselves as well.
When asked what they wanted to be when they grow up, their
responses reflected these dreams--an athlete, an artist, a doctor,
an engineer, a coach and a police woman were among the career
choices. Unfortunately, the reality of their current situations
and their future opportunities may clash dramatically with their
parents hopes and their own dreams.
As farmlaborers, migrant parents work long hours of manual
labor at low wages to try to earn enough money to provide for
46
their families. However, with average household incomes of only
$5,291 (Economic Research Service, USDA, 1988), it is no wonder
they are forced to turn to their children for help in meeting the
families' basic needs. Interns witnessed or heard of many migrant
children working in the fields, from as young as age four. Interns
describe their frustration and outrage at this situation:
Just the nature of the work is a problem. Here was
a family of six to eleven year olds who would skip
school to go out and work in the fields because the
family needed the money. It was very frustrating to
see a six-year-old go into the fields and work
instead of going to class.
One of the main disadvantages facing migrant
children is that they are often not able to attend
school because they are needed to work
I
will
always remember a six year old boy who would
sporadically miss days of school. I would ask him
where he had been and he would say "working. He
would then go on to tell me how much he preferred
going to school than working.
Out of the thirteen children we interviewed at the Benson
Migrant Education Program, eleven help their parents or other
relatives by working in the fields. Out of the other two, one said
her parents do not do farmwork at all, and the other had only been
in North Carolina for one month. The children quite candidly
discuss the work they perform:
Interview with Jose, age 8.
Do you ever help your parents in the fields?
Yes.
What do you do?
I take the cucumbers and put them in a basket. And
then we put them in a box and then we take them and
then they put them in a truck.
Do you like doing that?
No.
How come?
It's too hard.
Do you ever help with the tobacco?
Yeah.
What do you do with that?
When they bring like a big basket and then they
have leaves, and then I put them in a circle and
then you put them in, and there's a man on the
other side, and you turn it, and they put like a
big needle and then they put them in like a house.
Is that the tobacco barn?
Yes.
47
Interview with Sam, age 9.
I had one friend, but I haven't seen him since the
first day I went to work.
Went where?
To work, in the fields.
What do you do?
Pick up cucumbers.
So you're helping your daddy?
Yes, and my mom.
Do you like working?
Yeah. I likely got bitten by a snake one day. It
was in a ditch and I jumped across and didn't see
it. But they got an axe to chop it.
Interview with Jorge, age 13
What were you doing before this school started?
I was working in the fields with my uncle.
What will you do when this ends?
Go back to work.
Do you like it?
Yeah, it's all right, I get money.
Would you rather do that or be in school?
Be in school. It's hot out there when you work.
Interview with Erica, age 15
Have you ever worked in the fields?
Yes, last year I did. I worked barning tobacco,
because they didn't have enough people. I think I
did it during this program, in the afternoon. They
didn't have enough people, because some people got
sick from all the chemicals they put on it. So I
went, and well, I got really dirty. I didn't get
sick, but it made me itch. You have to work really
fast, you know. The trailors come really quickly,
and you have to empty them fast so they can take
another one out to get more. It's hard, if you've
never worked before. So you take the tobacco and
put it on this metal thing and you fill 'em up and
then take them out and put them in the barn.
The greatest challenge in migrant children's lives has long
been recognized as their uprootedness, their constant moving from
place to place, their never establishing a sense of home and
always leaving new friends. Their mobility disrupts their entire
lives, not just their educations. Our observations confirmed this
oft-cited problem, although there were some cases where parents
had done their best to lessen this problem. For example, one
student reported that someone in her family would stay with her in
Florida until school ended in June before heading up to North
Carolina to join the others. The family would make a point of
returning to Florida before the school term began in the fall to
prevent her from missing any of the school year. Other children
are not so fortunate. One child reports that after spending just
48
two months at school in Texas, his family moved to Mexico for
three months where he did not attend school at all. He then
returned to North Carolina for the final two months.
Not only do migrant children fall behind educationally when
they change schools, but they have difficulties adjusting
socially. Children whose first language is Spanish in particular
find it hard to come to North Carolina schools, where few of their
teachers or peers can understand them. Under these circumstances,
we were amazed at how quickly the children we knew did adapt to a
new culture, learn English and adjust to a new system. One student
describes her experiences:
In the 7th grade, I was here at Benson, then we
went to Mexico in the middle of the year, and when
we came back we moved and I went to a different
school. I did not like it. It's hard to be the new
kid. You really have to prove yourself to other
people so they can get to know you, who you really
are and what you are about. It's hard and some kids
just don't want to talk to you, and you really have
to keep yourself under control, and try not to be
somebody you're not. And that can get you in a lot
of trouble sometimes. You can say lies about
yourself and then all of a sudden you say the
truth. So you have to be yourself, and try to
maintain your capability of yourself.
As the migrant population has become predominantly Hispanic,
language barriers have become as pressing an educational issue for
migrant children as uprootedness. Several of the children we
interviewed expressed their preference for schools in Texas over
schools in North Carolina simply because of the acceptance of
their own language in Texas and the fact that there are more
people in Texas with whom to speak Spanish.
When Hispanic migrant students are in school, they are at a
severe learning disadvantage because of their difficulties with
the English language; nearly all the teachers in the Johnston
County public schools' two migrant programs cite language skills
as their students' greatest need. Interns working in the Benson
program saw that Mexican children often struggled with mathematics
because they do not understand English instructions and
terminology. Eight year olds whose speech suggested that they
have mastered English could not understand beginning reading
books, and eleven year olds lacked any confidence in their ability
to figure out the spelling of the words they use in conversation.
By age twelve, many migrant children spend more time in the
fields than they do in the classroom; if migrant children do not
learn to read and write English by the time they reach
adolescence, the chances are high that they will never learn.
Preventing English illiteracy among these children--and combatting
the English illiteracy of their parents and the problems it poses
to their families--is the greatest challenge facing the educators
of migrant children.
49
One intern noted the importance of being able to speak
Spanish with the little children at the Head Start program who
have not yet learned any English. For many migrant children,
attending Head Start is their first experience leaving their
parents and spending the day in a school setting. They get
frightened, upset, and excited, and many of them seem more
alienated than comforted when adults try to calm them speaking a
foreign language. Whether Head Start classes are to be conducted
solely in English or in both English and Spanish, teachers and
staff people need to be able to speak Spanish so they can meet the
personal needs of Spanish-speaking children.
In addition to needing to speak Spanish to children on some
occasions, migrant Head Start staff should know Spanish so they
can speak directly to Hispanic parents. Interns who attended
Shiloh's graduation ceremony during the first summer were shocked
that the entire event, with the exception of a few songs the
children sang, was conducted solely in English. Most of the
parents in attendance spoke little or no English. Having a
Hispanic recruiter and calling on volunteers to translate is not
adequate for a program that serves predominantly Spanish-speaking
families. The new Head Start program at St. Martin's has done a
better job of hiring Spanish-speaking staff members for their
center, which should be the practice at all Migrant Head Start
centers.
In rural North Carolina, where migrants do not live in one
concentrated area but instead are spread across hundreds of miles,
providing transportation to bring children to educational agencies
is a serious problem. A few student volunteers rose at dawn to be
bus monitors for the Head Start centers. They rode on fifty mile
routes to pick up infants and young children near their camps. At
Shiloh, they put babies into child seats and, because there were
not enough special seats for everyone, strapped some children as
young as one year old into flimsy seatbelts and hoped there would
not be an accident. An hour and a half after the first children
were picked up, the bus load of sleepy children arrived at the
Head Start Center.
Obviously, it does no good to offer services for migrant
children if the children cannot get to the place where services
are provided. Migrant Head Start programs do the best job they
can with their limited resources to bring children to programs as
safely and quickly as possible. In the Shiloh program, migrant
pre-schoolers had to take trips over an hour long, often without
proper safety restraints, just to get to the Head Start Center.
The transportation situation was horrible, yet knowing these
children's alternatives as well as they did, the interns
reluctantly tolerated it.
Some fortunate parents are able to send their pre-school
children to a Migrant Head Start program, where the children are
cared for from early in the morning to mid-afternoon. Neither the
Shiloh Center nor St. Martin's could accommodate all the children
who were eligible to enroll, and some parents did not even know
the programs existed. The many children who are not able to
attend Head Start are either taken out to the fields or are left
behind at migrant camps.
50
Migrant Head Start programs are an absolute necessity for
migrant children and their families. They are the only safe place
for migrant children six weeks to five years old to go while their
parents are working. Head Start provides them with healthy meals,
medical care, clean places to play, and adult supervision. The
program also introduces young children to a school atmosphere,
teaches them to interact with their peers, and prepares them for
elementary school. However, more space needs to be available for
all children who need it, more transportation should be provided,
class size should be reduced, and the quality of teachers should
be improved, including the hiring of more migrants themselves, when
possible.
The Benson Public Schools Migrant Summer School program faced
some of the same logistical problems as the Head Start program.
Summer school students had excessively long bus rides to get to
and from the program, and many eligible children could not be
accommodated. Many qualified migrant children spent their days in
the fields working rather than in school learning. One intern
noted: "I feel that college students could be a big help in
reaching more of these families where children really want to
learn but our unable to go to school due to lack of
transportation."
Worst of all, however, there was no summer school program
for any migrant children for most of the summer; because of the
financial constraints in the program, migrant summer school was in
session for only four weeks. Every teacher who responded to our
evaluation cited funding needs as their biggest concern in migrant
education. Without adequate time with the students, adequate
materials, and appropriate student-teacher ratios, few gains can
be made in migrant education.
Once the summer school program started in July, other
logistical problems were obstacles to teaching the children. Each
student was to follow an educational prescription based upon his
or her performance on diagnostic tests. It took most of the first
week for tests to be administered, reviewed, and turned into
personalized curricula; in the largest class, the process took
nearly two weeks--half the session--to complete. The last few
days of the program were dedicated to administering achievement
tests. Some students actually spent more of their time in the
testing process than in any kind of learning process.
All of the interns felt that some other means of developing
individualized lessons needs to be devised for any program as
short as four weeks. Many of the students had a great deal of
difficulty with the diagnostic tests they were given, and while
the tests eventually helped to pinpoint the areas in which each
student needed special help, they also reaffirmed many of the
children's beliefs that they cannot perform the tasks they are
expected to complete in school.
Once the students had their personalized curricula, they
lacked adequate materials. The instructional materials for the
older children had literally fallen apart; salvaged sheets were
kept in a looseleaf binder, and students took turns getting the
pages they needed, often waiting for the single copy of a
worksheet.
51
Even in the short length of time the summer school program
ran, students made progress in mastering skills. They also
benefitted from having a clean, safe, supervised place to go
during the days while their parents and siblings were at work,
from getting a nutritious breakfast and lunch, and from receiving
vision, hearing, and dental examinations and treatment.
An intern who had contact with all the classes summed up
the teaching in the Benson program by noting that she saw the very
best teaching she had ever seen, and also the very worst teaching
she had ever seen. Some teachers gave incredible amounts of
energy and care to their students and found exciting ways to
engage them in learning. Others were distant, did not respect
their students, and were unwilling to try new approaches. The
administrator in charge of the program has expressed her
disappointment in the quality of some teaching, and she is re-
evaluating the process for selecting summer school teachers.
In speaking with representatives from migrant education
programs around the nation, it has become clear that inadequate
local migrant programs often reflect local public education
programs that are deficient in general. Teachers in rural North
Carolina are among the lowest paid in the Southeast, and while
high wages would not guarantee quality teaching, low wages are a
major factor in quality teachers' decisions to work elsewhere.
There are some excellent teachers working in rural North Carolina,
but there are not enough; the dearth of quality teachers
throughout rural America can be seen in the education of migrant
students.
Discrimination proved to be another barrier facing migrant
children, most of whom belong to a minority population. Since the
summer program was designed specifically and solely for migrant
children, it gave them an opportunity to be in school and be on
relatively equal ground with their classmates. Unfortunately,
many of the teachers in the migrant summer program seemed to lack
cultural sensitivity and personal knowledge of migrants'
lifestyles. Rather than learn to pronounce foreign names, some
teachers Anglicized their Hispanic students' names. One exhibited
more serious and pronounced racism, stereotyping all Hispanics as
well-raised, good kids while complaining of African-American
students' "black attitudes."
Interns also noted the racial tensions between the black and
Hispanic children in the program, which teachers did little to
control. While some of the children reported they had felt no or
little racial discrimination or tension, others had encountered
difficulties. The following is an excerpt from an interview with a
nine year old boy.
Q: Tell me about the other kids in your class.
A: Some of them, they want to fight all the time. I
try to walk away, but they keep messing with me.
Well, there was a white boy, he called me a nigger,
so I picked him up by his throat and threw him
half-way across the hall. That was in the second
grade.
52
The Benson Public School cafeteria at lunchtime during the
Migrant Summer School Program might have seemed perfectly normal
to a casual observer, but something seemed peculiar to those of
the interns who ate there every day for four weeks. The racial
divisions that could be explained as childhood insensitivity among
the youngest children exhibited itself more starkly with the
oldest children, who segregated themselves at separate lunchroom
tables. A huge cultural divide was apparent; it was not, however,
the most disturbing characteristic of the lunchroom crowd.
What was truly strange about this particular room full of
just under 100 elementary and junior high school children was that
it was quite orderly and quiet. These children were more than
well-behaved; with a few exceptions, they were frighteningly
obedient. They were that way everywhere, with the occasional
exception of physical education class, which provided their only
recess time.
What was disturbing about their behavior was not so much that
they followed directions, but that they needed directions. The
intern who taught art classes saw this most clearly. The
kindergarten students would try creative things, but children as
young as seven lacked any belief in their own abilities to do
something new. The intern who worked with fourth, fifth, and
sixth graders saw the same thing in his class, where the children
always wanted to trace things rather than draw them and where they
were always asking a teacher or teaching assistant what they
should do.
Many of the children seemed to lack any sense or claim to
self-determination. There was something heroic about the few
children who ever questioned a teacher's authority or consciously
disobeyed an instruction. There was something hopeful about
seeing a few migrant children refuse to do what they were supposed
to do.
These are children who are more likely to go to work at age
twelve--or at age six--than to graduate from high school and go on
to college. These are children who, even in the many cases where
their parents want them to get an education, will be breaking with
family tradition if they do not stay in the migrant stream. These
are children who will be defying many of their teachers'
expectations if they graduate from high school. These are
children who especially need to learn how to make up their own
directions; otherwise, they will have no other opportunity than to
continue to follow along in the migrant stream.
Perhaps the greatest need in migrant education, and the
greatest role we can play as volunteers and friends, is to raise
migrant students' self-esteem. One intern stated:
It is important to find teachers who will
understand the lifestyle of these children and who
will build upon the desire in them to continue
learning despite the odds against them. It is
important to find teachers who will show then that
they can do it.
53
HOW WE CAN BETTER MEET
THE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF MIGRANT CHILDREN
A Recommitment of Federal Resources to Meeting the Needs
of Migrant Children:
While we are hopeful about the potential for increased
college student volunteerism with agencies that provide for
migrant children's needs, we realize that even a national corps of
the most committed and able student volunteers will be unable to
provide for the bulk of migrant children's unmet needs. Student
volunteers can add a valuable personal dimension to migrant
education programs and they can assist agencies in meeting many
professional needs, but they cannot take the place of trained
staff and they cannot remedy the fiscal problems that plague
migrant service agencies.
We also know that volunteers cannot be very effective working
with agencies that are barely functioning. The professionals who
attempt to meet the many needs of migrant children and farmworkers
struggle to do their jobs with meager resources, rarely knowing if
they will have enough funds to continue their work a month or a
year later. Many hardworking, committed individuals sacrifice
their personal security in order to serve the migrant population,
yet constant financial worries prevent them from giving their full
energy and attention to their clients. Migrant children and their
families will never be adequately served until the agencies meant
to provide for their needs are adequately supported.
We need to reverse the past decade's trend of reduced federal
support for migrant education programs. In its draft policy brief
"Summary Information on Chapter 1 Migrant Education Funding", the
Interstate Migrant Education Council found that from 1979 to 1989
as the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) migrant students
increased by 43%, allocation of federal funds to migrant education
programs increased by less than 16%. In 1979, $629.89 were
allocated per FTE migrant student, whereas only $507.76 were
allocated in 1989. In constant 1979 dollars, this amounts to only
$279.83 per FTE migrant student.
The results of these cuts were apparent in the programs where
the interns worked, in the materials and in the transportation
problems that prevented the schools from reaching all eligible
migrant children. These cuts were most apparent when the Johnston
County migrant summer school program could not afford to be open
for more than four weeks. These cuts were most apparent when
young children were seen working in tobacco and cucumber fields or
left at home without adult supervision. We cannot hope to address
the educational needs of migrant children without a recommitment
of the federal government to full funding of migrant education
programs.
We recommend that the Department of Education increase
funding to migrant education programs across the nation to per
child allocations comparable to those of the late 1970s. With
increased funding, programs could run for longer periods of time,
hire qualified, quality teaching personnel, provide adequate and
54
appropriate materials, provide more individualized attention to
each student, and better prepare migrant children to meet the
challenges ahead.
An Increased Effort to Accommodate Migrant Children:
In addition to full funding of special educational programs
for migrant children, we have seen a need for an increased effort
to accommodate migrant children's special educational
circumstances. We have spoken with migrant children and parents
who have encountered inflexible state education systems that
prevented migrant students from advancing from grade to grade
because they missed required end-of-year examinations. Certainly
migrant students should not be exempt from achievement tests that
ensure a student has mastered the skills needed to move on to the
next grade, but surely provisions can be made to allow migrant
students who are not in attendance when tests are administered to
make up the examinations when they return to school. Being left
back in school is one of the major contributing factors linked to
students' decisions to drop out. There are enough obstacles to
migrants' educations without schools' staunch regulations becoming
a deterrent to staying in school.
There are many programs around the nation that are doing a
great deal to adjust to the special educational circumstances of
migrant children. The Texas Migrant Council has taken an
appropriate, novel approach to providing consistent educational
services to migratory children: they provide migratory tutors.
The Geneseo Migrant Center runs a study-at-home correspondence
course specifically designed for migrant farmworkers. Florida's
migrant education programs include a summer institute for migrant
high school students at the greatest risk of not graduating, and
an advocate program to connect migrant students with a full range
of educational and non-educational services. The local migrant
education program in McAllen, Texas involves the entire community
in a wide array of activities to support the district's 3,000
migrant students. Special programs encouraging migrant students
in McAllen to go to college, from campus visits with formerly
migratory college students to scholarship programs funded from
within the community, help to account for the 33% college
attendance rate of McAllen's migrant students.
We recommend that the U.S. Department of Education find ways
to encourage similar innovations around the nation as part of a
renewed commitment to meeting the educational needs of migrant
children. The futures of over half a million children depend upon
it.
An Expanded Plan for Student Action
Student volunteers can help migrant children, their families,
and the agencies serving them to cope with their situations. In
doing so, college students will benefit from the educations they
will receive from their experiences, as well as from the bonds
they will form with the people with whom they work.
Until children no longer migrate while their peers learn to
read and write, until children no longer pick cucumbers and succor
55
tobacco while their peers learn mathematics and history, until
children no longer struggle to understand workbook questions
written in an unfamiliar language while their peers struggle to
figure out answers--in short, until migrant children no longer
have special educational needs--there will be plenty that student
volunteers can contribute to them. Based upon our experiences and
the input of representatives from other student volunteer programs
and migrant education, health and legal services agencies, we have
developed a framework for a nationwide program of student
volunteerism with migrant and seasonal farmworker children and
their families.
Over the past three months we have solicited the input of
potential sponsoring organizations in our efforts to create a
national network of volunteers working with farmworkers. We have
developed a needs assessment survey and have sent a preliminary
mailing to over one hundred organizations. We targeted national
and regional groups as well as agencies in North Carolina and
Florida for this first mailing. We have received responses from
nearly forty representatives of education, health, legal services,
job-training and advocacy groups for migrant and seasonal
farmworker.
Our preliminary findings indicate a great need for help in
the work of these agencies and demonstrate that student volunteers
have much to contribute through wisely and efficiently planned
programs. However, our respondents also reinforced the fact that
there is little student volunteers alone can do to change the
social, economic and political forces which keep farmworkers in
positions of poverty and voicelessness.
When asked to rank the primary concerns of the farmworkers
they served, the program directors or staff overwhelmingly listed
wages as the top priority for their client population. Without
adequate income, farmworkers are unable to provide for the basic
necessities of food, housing, or health care, the lack of which
contributes to educational deficits and other problems. Living
conditions were listed as the second greatest concern to
farmworkers, followed by immigration status. Learning English was
fourth, while working conditions were ranked fifth. Day care,
education and transportation were also listed as high priorities.
An appropriate student volunteer effort, therefore, must be aimed
at addressing all of these diverse problems.
Only half of the survey respondents currently have student
volunteers or interns working in their programs. However, nearly
all expressed a strong interest in involving college students in
the work they do. Only those organizations (four in total) geared
toward providing technical assistance or those engaged only in
networking felt they could not use students. Most organizations
felt they could use between two and four interns. The proposed
activities varied, depending on the type of organization. Most
school programs want students to serve as tutors or teaching
assistants. Some also suggested that students could serve as
social workers, health aides, bus monitors and interpreters for
home visits. One migrant education director noted the benefits of
student volunteers in her program "They have been a tremendous
assistance to Yadkin County schools. Students test scores are
56
higher due to the one-on-one instruction which causes the students
to develop higher self-esteem. Volunteers make our students feel
special and serve as role models."
Several non-school organizations suggested that students
could do research on issues which affect farmworkers. Other
programs want students to do outreach, to develop educational
materials for farmworkers, to raise the awareness of the general
population on farmworker issues, to teach English, and to help
with fundraising, translation and transportation. Several
organizations were able to propose special projects which the
full-time staff did not have time to work on but would enhance
their programs tremendously. We found that when we were able to
speak personally with program directors the ideas for special
projects seemed to flow. As one sponsor of interns commented in
her survey: "Our organization has been able to take on more
projects than it otherwise would have been able to, and have
accomplished them in a timely manner" Another respondent noted:
"They allow us to do things that might have been left undone, due
to vast job responsibilities."
In addition, we asked respondents what other ways students
could work with farmworkers, outside of their own organization.
Many mentioned educational programs, for both children and adults,
particularly the need for ESL and literacy classes. In addition,
work on advocacy and organizing projects was stressed. Assisting
in health clinics was a frequent response, as well as general
social service work and day care.
We recommend the expansion of the Duke internship project to
other universities and other farmworker communities across the
nation. We are currently developing a grant proposal to submit to
the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education's
"Innovative Projects for Student Community Service" section. We
feel that this would be an appropriate funding source for the
expansion stages of our program. The national plan we propose aims
to provide college student volunteers to work with farmworker
families and the agencies that serve them in all the places they
travel and at all times of the year. Using our own program as a
starting point, we have devised several major expansions that
could ultimately lead to coordinated involvement of student
volunteers in migrant education and other service and advocacy
programs throughout the nation.
57
STUDENT ACTION WITH FARMWORKERS: A PROPOSAL
Mission
To bring college students and migrant and seasonal
farmworkers and their families together to learn about each
other's lives, share resources and skills, and work for social
change.
Goals
To educate students and others on college campuses about
the situations of farmworkers.
To find out from farmworkers, service providers and
advocates what needs exist among the farmworker population.
To help students build internships and other volunteer
projects that will be mutual learning experiences for college
students and farmworkers.
To serve as a clearinghouse of information on farmworker
issues, agencies and resources.
To link together students, farmworkers and other advocates
from around the country to share their experiences and ideas and
to develop better programs to meet farmworkers' needs.
Phase I: Needs Assessment Survey
January to June 1992
During the next six months, students from the Duke project will
continue to establish contact with farmworker organizations and service
agencies across the country. We will describe our desire to involve more
college students in their work, and through our needs assessment survey
attempt to discover the primary needs of farmworkers and how college
students can best become involved with this population. We plan to
contact the following types of organizations: public school migrant
education programs, Migrant Head Start centers, migrant health clinics,
migrant or rural legal services programs, job-training programs, and
grassroots organizations. At the end of this time, we will have a
database of farmworker agencies across the country with their
suggestions for involving student volunteers in the work they do. This
survey will provide a much better idea of what programs already exist
and will give us ideas for the creation of new efforts and new ways for
students and farmworkers to interact.
In addition to summer internships, we envision the creation of
full-year programs in the "home states" such as Florida or Texas, that
might involve tutoring projects in the schools or migrant camps, big
sibling projects, adult literacy efforts, health education programs,
and many other initiatives.
During this time we will also increase our contact with the
student service network and try to find other college campuses with
student volunteer projects working with farmworkers.
58
Phase II: Southeastern Summer Project
July 1992-August 1993
During this year we will plan and implement the Southeastern
Summer Project, a service-learning internship experience for thirty
students from schools in the southern part of the Eastern migrant stream
with a target area of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and
West Virginia. We will recruit a diverse group of students who will be
united by a desire to become involved in community service with
farmworkers. Students will receive a stipend for their ten weeks of
community service and will have the option of also receiving academic
credit. Housing will be provided for the student interns.
During the year we will develop three site for students to work
with farmworkers, most likely in three different states, such as South
Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Students will work with
education, health or legal services programs which serve migrant and
seasonal farmworkers and their families. The specific nature of their
internships will be developed according to the needs of the farmworker
population in each area. For example, some students may concentrate on
adult literacy work, others may work in the public schools or migrant
Head Start centers, and others could create new materials for worker
safety projects. In each site, the goals will be to create innovative
approaches to solving problems faced by farmworkers and to help empower
farmworkers themselves to meet their own needs in the long-term.
The summer will begin with an intensive two week orientation
period for all thirty interns at one of the three worksites. The
orientation will involve readings about migrant and seasonal
farmworkers, rural poverty, community development and other related
topics. Students will also view various videos or films on these issues.
In addition, students will have an opportunity to meet and talk with
farmworkers, advocates, service providers, community organizers and
others with expertise and experience in this type of work and
environment.
The students will be divided into three groups of ten and will
spend the next two months at their worksites in rural communities.
Each site will be staffed by a student project coordinator. The
director of Student Action with Farmworkers and a faculty member from
one of the participating colleges will spend time at each site.
Throughout the summer, the groups will meet regularly to discuss their
experiences and to consider their work in larger contexts. Students will
also be asked to reflect personally on their experiences through a
journal or weekly reaction paper. At the end of the summer, those
students receiving academic credit will complete a longer in-depth paper
on a topic related to the summer.
Through this summer experience students will be able to apply
their talents and energies to some of the most pressing problems faced
by America's farmworkers. They will learn from farmworkers about a
different way of life and culture. Students will learn from the staff at
the agencies where they work and will hopefully become more interested
and capable of entering a career in public service. Other activities for
our first year will include the creation of a newsletter, brochure and
other program materials. We will build a diverse Board of Advisors to
help guide the program.
59
Phase III: Local and Regional Leadership
September 1993-August 1994
Student who have participated in the summer project will return to
their own colleges and universities ready to initiate campus-based
community service projects working with farmworkers in their area. These
projects will be created and implemented at the local level by students,
faculty, administrators, agency staff, and farmworkers to suit the needs
of the members of that community. Student Action with Farmworkers'
staff will continue to work closely with these groups to help them
develop quality programs. In this way, the project will grow
exponentially, from the original thirty students to an estimated one
hundred and fifty students in this second year
During this phase we will also reach out to other schools in the
eastern stream while continuing to support the efforts of those students
who participated in the summer project. We will present our project and
resource materials at various community service and migrant education,
health or legal services conferences and to contacts at campus volunteer
centers. We will assist interested contacts in developing a service-
learning program for students at their school to work with farmworkers.
The emphasis during this phase will be on schools in North Carolina and
Florida, states which contain the largest concentration of farmworkers
on the East Coast and states where there has been a strong interest
shown by college students in initiating new projects.
Another important goal during this phase will be to establish
strong regional networks, and to create leadership opportunities for
students in each state or region. For example, the schools in south
Florida could link their efforts and have a few students serve as the
coordinators for the various schools in their area. This would create
stronger relationships on a local level, and facilitate the process of
placing student interns from different schools into the program in that
area.
In the spring of 1994, we will hold our first conference. This
will be a chance for students, farmworkers, community organizers,
advocates and service providers from all over the region to come
together to share ideas and energy in order to improve their programs or
initiate new ones.
Phase IV: Westward Expansion
September 1994 and beyond
During this time we will begin to work in the Mid-West stream,
and eventually will reach the west coast. It should be noted that
throughout the first three phases we will work with any school in the
nation who is interested, but that the focus of our outreach, in order
to be most effective, will remain on the East Coast.
Networks:
We are currently developing relationships with the following
organizations in the student service movement: Campus Outreach
Opportunity League (COOL), VA COOL, Student Coalition for Action in
Literacy Education (SCALE), BreakAway: The Alternative Break Connection,
Florida's Office for Campus Volunteers (FOCV), and the National Society
for Internships and Experiential Education (NSIEE).
We are in contact with the following national or regional
organizations that work on migrant farmworker issues: East Coast Migrant
60
Head Start Project, Migrant Legal Action Program, Farmworkers Justice
Fund, East Coast Migrant Health Project, National Commission on Migrant
Education, Eastern Stream Center on Resources and Training (ESCORT) and
the National Farmworker Ministry.
In addition, we are in contact with nearly fifty organizations in
North Carolina and Florida. We have a mailing list of several hundred
other organizations with which we plan to communicate.
Outcomes:
The migrant farmworker internship project is different from most
internships because the focus is on both providing service to members of
a community and at the same time providing structured opportunities for
a group of students to learn and grow from the experience. During their
ten weeks in eastern North Carolina, the Duke interns realized that
"education" was a mutual process, and that they learned as much from the
migrant children and their families as they were able to teach.
In an ideal project, students, farmworkers, the organizations that
serve farmworkers, the university, and the society at large all benefit.
In this mutually beneficial relationship, college students can assist
farmworkers by helping with transportation, serving as translators,
teaching English, doing outreach work with a health screening team, and
providing extra hands in a migrant day care center or public school
program. Farmworkers, in return, have much to teach college students
about a different way of life, a different language and culture, and the
importance of work for social change and justice. The overburdened and
financially-strained organizations that work with farmworkers, such as
legal services programs, health clinics, schools, and community-based
groups, can benefit from the energy and talents of student interns. In
return, the staff of such organizations can help students learn and
encourage more young people to enter careers in public service. The
university benefits when students return to campus and share what they
have learned, encouraging more students to join in the community service
movement. The society benefits when migrant children receive a better
education, when health care is available to more farmworkers, when
people of different backgrounds and cultures interact and develop
greater respect for one another, and when people from all cultures move
on to socially responsible leadership roles.
The impact of a project such as this is very difficult to measure.
During the initial Southeastern Summer Project, thirty students will be
affected from approximately ten to fifteen schools. They will then reach
out to students on their campuses and home communities to share what
they have learned and help others become involved on the local level. In
addition, Student Action with Farmworkers will be working with contacts
at other interested campuses to assist in initiating new service
projects. Projected impact for Phases II, III and IV follows:
Phase II: 30 students
Phase III: 150 students
Phase IV: 300 students
Evaluation:
Each intern will be asked to write an essay before they
participate in the Southeastern Summer Project to capture their initial
impressions about farmworkers and community service work in general. At
61
the end of the summer, they will evaluate the experience and discuss
how, if at all, their views or goals have changed.
When projects are initiated on the local level, each participant
in an internship or other volunteer effort will complete a written
evaluation form for the project coordinators at his or her school, which
will be forwarded to the national office. In addition, the organizations
that sponsor interns will complete an annual evaluation for the campus
and national office. We will ask that each school we work with evaluate
the information, networking, and consulting services of Student Action
with Farmworkers.
Structure:
We will build a Board of Advisors who will help steer the
direction of the organization and set various policies. We will recruit
a diverse group of board members, including students, faculty,
administrators, farmworkers, advocates, and service providers from
different parts of the country and with different backgrounds.
The original staff will consist of one project director, chosen
for his or her experience and expertise in working with both college
students and farmworkers, who will be assisted by two or three work-
study students. With each phase, we hope to add a staff person who will
take responsibility for working in a particular geographic region.
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CONCLUSION
Overall, our experiences from the past two summers have shown
that student volunteers can help the agencies that try to meet the
needs of migrant children and their families. They can have an
impact upon individual children's lives at a personal level. They
can even help to empower migrant children with educational
achievement and with improved self-esteem. As Dr. Robert Coles has
said: "We're not going to change the so-called structural or
economic problems that create this kind of migrant living. But we
can be of some help as individuals or groups of individuals
reaching out to particular children, to particular groups of
children, to particular communities of migrants." At the same
time, Coles adds, students can benefit from the experience:
"Students can learn an enormous amount about the country they live
in, about the communities that are not so far away from where they
are getting an education. They can learn this way. Otherwise, they
won't learn at all."
However, the range of problems preventing migrant children
from receiving proper educations are rooted in basic national
values and priorities. Migrant children are the losers in the
political games that perpetuate the migrant farm labor economy and
allow the nation's educational infrastructure to decay.
As tutors, translators and friends, student volunteers can do
little more than treat the symptoms of the underlying social
problems that damage the education and future hopes of migrant
children and their families. Perhaps the greatest contribution
student volunteers can make to these children is to bring
attention to their plight and to demand that we as a nation--not
as a thousand points of light flickering dimly in the darkness of
our countryside, but as a responsible national community of
compassionate people--provide for the basic needs of migrant
children.
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