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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Africa Europe Latin America Middle East North America Out of fields, into class for migrant kids By CHRISTINE ARMARIO,Associated Press Writer - Monday, September 28 Send IM Story Print OCALA, Fla. – Elizabeth Pineda climbs out from bed, her 4-year-old son Adrian asleep nearby. She lays out a tiny pair of shorts and a white T-shirt for his first day of school, gathers her purse and tiptoes outside. Her cousin will get the boy up and off to class in a few hours. It is 4 a.m. and only a few solitary street lamps light the darkened roads in this rural central Florida community. She climbs into an old white Ford work van and starts the engine. Pineda, the 20-year-old daughter of migrant farmworkers, is heading to the peanut fields. It's a story repeated in migrant families across the United States: A chain of labor that stretches from one generation to the next. As a little girl, Pineda helped pick oranges from the lowest branches as her father worked from a ladder overhead. As a single mother, she has sometimes had to bring Adrian along as well _ letting him play with toy cars in the van while she picked peanuts nearby. Private childcare is too expensive for most of these families, and the alternatives are limited. The government offers a Head Start program for the children of migrant and seasonal laborers. But it serves only a fraction of those eligible, according to estimates by providers and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Waiting lists stretch hundreds of children long in parts of the country. Those who can't get in go to friends' care, or to state-run pre-kindergartens or to the fields, where they are exposed to the heat, insects, chemicals and heavy machinery and where, each year, some children are hurt or even killed. In this farming town, two Head Start centers have opened in the last year. And with a $26 million boost for Early Head Start in federal stimulus funds and separate $10 million expansion, nonprofit organizations around the country are hoping to expand enrollment of migrant infants and toddlers by thousands more. The goal: Besides providing a safe haven, the programs offer access to basic social services, help teach English and aim to set these children on a path toward parity with their peers in kindergarten. Pineda has enrolled Adrian. Her dream: That he never has to do what she does. ___ How many young children follow their parents into America's fields isn't known. Care providers estimate that just under one-fifth of children eligible for Migrant and Seasonal Head Start are enrolled (about 35,000 in 2007, according to the most current national figures). Yvette Sanchez-Fuentes, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association in Washington, said she accepted the estimate "just because of the amount of wait lists that they have across the country." In South Texas, there are 400 children on the waiting list of the largest provider of migrant Head Start services. During the peak season in Michigan, the waiting list sometimes exceeds 200 children, many of them vulnerable infants and toddlers, officials said. Parents have become better educated about the dangers of the fields, Sanchez-Fuentes said, but still there are tragedies. In Newport, Tenn., Arnulfo Hernandez and his wife, Esmeralda, took their 11-month-old son, Jesse, with them to the tomato fields in 2007. Other migrant families had encouraged them to enroll him in a Head Start program, but the young parents, then just 22 and 20, were reluctant to do so. "They were very nervous about being apart from their baby, and we do hear about raids," said J Davis, the nonprofit Telamon Corp.'s Tennessee state director. "'What's going to happen if I'm away from my child and immigration shows up and I disappear?'" The couple put Jesse in the back of their van, rolled down the windows and left the back door up, according to a report filed by the Cocke County Sheriff's Office. They tied a thin string used to keep tomato plants upright from a seat in the car to a belt loop on Jesse's pants to keep him from wandering away, Chief Detective Robert Caldwell said. Esmeralda Hernandez told detectives she checked on her son every five minutes. But at one point, the couple found Jesse unresponsive. He'd gotten his neck tangled in the string and strangled, Caldwell said. "They were devastated," Davis said. "We were all devastated." In Polk City, Fla., 2-year-old Ruben Velasquez crawled out of a truck as his family picked oranges in 2006. He was between the vehicle and a flatbed trailer when his 10-year-old brother moved the truck forward, crushing him. "Every so often, you do hear horror stories," said Lourdes Villanueva, director of farmworker advocacy with the Redlands Christian Migrant Association. "But the potential for that happening is all the time." ___ The path Pineda drives to the fields is long and, at times, jolting. She stops first outside a beige trailer and honks. A wrinkled, groggy-eyed man in flip-flops emerges and languidly pulls himself into the van. She picks up nearly a dozen more workers, the youngest just 13. They are tired and silent. Several are barefoot. The van whips through overgrown grass in the darkness, no visible destination in sight. It's usually her father's job to drive the laborers, but he is sick. So the duty falls on her. Pineda has long black hair and wears a pair of light-blue jeans with sequined crosses on the back pockets. Growing up, she went to eight different schools, depending on where her parents were traveling to work. They mostly stayed in Florida, but also went to South Carolina, where her father worked in the tobacco fields. She managed to earn As and Bs in school. Then, at 16, she got pregnant. After graduating from high school, she went to work in the fields. She has held other jobs _ gas station attendant, restaurant hostess _ but says she couldn't get enough hours. Now, with the recession, she says there is no other work to be found around Ocala, about 95 miles north of Tampa. And so she harvests peanuts, an especially labor-intensive crop, with low-growing plants that offer no shelter from the sun. The first few days of the season, Pineda says her muscles ache so much she can hardly sit and stand when she gets home. The fields are no place for a child, she believes, and yet when she couldn't find someone to care for her son she often took him with her. A Migrant and Seasonal Head Start program opened up nearby when he was 3, but Pineda says there wasn't space for him. This year, a second center opened up in Ocala, and Adrian got in. "Hopefully he never has to go to the fields and pick," Pineda says. __ Research on early learning has shown the importance of building basic cognitive and social skills from an early age. Children from low-income families know about 3,000 words by age 6, while those from high-income backgrounds know 20,000, a 1995 study estimated. Children from privileged families hear millions more words by age 3 than those from less affluent backgrounds, according to a 2003 study. Migrant children in particular are a vulnerable population, as they often attend more than one school each year, and sometimes in different states, meaning academic requirement vary. "These children do not have a typical home," Villanueva said. "Many times, there's two or three families living together in one trailer, so there's no room for a bookshelf, for example." They may also feel pressure to help contribute to the family income and work in the fields. In some states, farmers can employ children as young as 10 or 12 outside school hours. When the Head Start centers open they are sometimes the children's first link to social services. Villanueva, who is based in central Florida, recalls seeing children who had suffered so many untreated ear infections that scar tissue had left them with hearing loss. Other young children had teeth that needed to be extracted. The immigration debate inevitably trickles into any attempt to provide services. In Bybee, Tenn., about 70 miles southeast of Nashville, a 72-year-old farmer decided to lease land for a migrant Head Start day care program in 1999 in order to give his workers' children a place to go. His neighbors responded with an angry march, threatening letters and harassing phone calls. Then his hay barn was set on fire, in what investigators said was an act of arson and possible hate crime. No arrests have been made in the case. "I never bothered nobody _ I just wanted to help them kids," James Ellison said at the time. Today there are over 450 centers in 40 states, and funding has been increasing in recent years. About $288 million was allocated for the program in the 2007 fiscal year. This year, stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act could increase enrollment by as many as 8,000 infants and toddlers, Sanchez-Fuentes said. Many of the students are U.S. citizens, she added _ "kids that are going to go into our public schools and then hopefully into our universities." Growers mainly support migrant Head Start initiatives. "As a general rule, farm employers would prefer not to have young children around the field," said Ron Gaskill, senior director of congressional relations for labor and environment for the American Farm Bureau. Davis of Telamon recalled a recent plea to make room for more children, so they wouldn't go to the fields. It came from a farmer who "doesn't want the liability of the danger and the exposure to pesticides." ___ Pineda's van comes to a stop in the middle of a dark field. The headlights of a few cars shine onto patches of green peanut plants. In the distance, small circles of light bob up and down like fireflies. They are the headlamps of workers already digging for peanuts. Pineda's group steps out into the sand. The scent of peanuts fills the air. The sky is freckled with stars. A car blares music from Conjunto Primavera _ a norteno act whose name translates "Spring Band" _ and the workers laugh and squeal with the music, more festive than the surroundings would suggest. Seventeen-year-old Omar Bautista, shoeless but with socks to protect his feet from ants, has duct tape strapped around each of his fingers and the palm of his hand. The leaves and the peanuts aren't sharp themselves, but pulling them like a rope can burn your skin. "I was born with a peanut plant in my hand," he says with a laugh. Bautista's 13-year-old brother lies asleep still in the truck. They are both due to start school in a week. In the darkness, Pineda is thinking about classes. Today is her son's first day. She herself has started night school once a week and is taking two online courses, aiming to finish college and become a massage therapist or maybe a teacher. Today she will earn $2.50 for each bucket of peanuts she can fill. She hopes to fill at least 10. Pineda leans against the front of her van as workers start divvying up the buckets. She waits for the sun to rise. 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