When the Rosalez children reached their teens, the family settled down. They lived on their savings in the winter when the fields lay fallow. "Even though my mom was illiterate, with no education in Spanish or English, she was excellent at budgeting," longtime Oregon educator David Rosalez recalls. "My parents were so proud of the fact that they never had to go on food subsidies or welfare."
The family left the migrant stream, Rosalez says, so that he and his brother and sister could earn their diplomas. "That," he says, "is an indication of how very much our parents cared about what kind of education we received. People say migrant parents don't care. They do care. They have dreams for their kids."
When the family started wintering in Central Oregon in the mid-1960s, they were among a handful of families who had settled in the Madras, Metolius, Culver area, he says. Today, the Jefferson County School District enrolls 550 Hispanic students--almost 20 percent of its student body.
Like Jefferson, rural districts all over the Northwest have seen their Hispanic enrollments double and triple in the past decade as families like the Rosalezes settle near the fields that drew them there. In Oregon, for instance, the number of Hispanic students in public schools increased more than 60 percent in the decade between 1974 and 1984--from 8,000 to 13,000. By 1994, nearly 33,000 Hispanic students were in Oregon classrooms.
Washington has seen the same quantum growth in its Hispanic population. The orchards of Central Washington's river valleys, which produce 60 percent of the nation's apples, have drawn thousands of Hispanic farmworkers over the years. Some have bought orchards and become growers, just as Midwestern igrants fleeing the Dust Bowl did in the 1930s, says Jim Thomas of the Washington tate Apple Commission.
Patricia Sandoval, a kindergartner at Gates Elementary School in Oregon's Santiam Canyon School District, gets bilingual instruction in a multiage classroom. Photo by Jay Reiter.
"Most of today's growers came as pickers during the Great Depression," Thomas says. "The cycle continues. This is a very labor-intensive industry. The opportunities are there for anyone who is willing to work hard."
Today, Oregon's Hispanic student enrollment tops 6 percent of total enrollment--a bigger proportion than any other ethnic minority group. In Idaho and Washington the picture is similar, with Hispanic enrollment exceeding 7 percent.
The Northwest trend reflects a pattern across America, where Hispanics make up the fastest-growing minority group. The growth accelerated in 1986, when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The new law allowed longtime seasonal farmworkers to apply for legal residency.
"The act was a definite watermark," says Gloria Muñiz of the Oregon Department of Education. "When they became legal, they were no longer tied to being migrant. They were no longer part of an underground economy, being used by growers to harvest crops with little regard for legality and little opportunity to settle out, put down roots, and raise a family."
In Oregon alone, 30,000 laborers applied for seasonal agricultural worker status during the 18 months after passage of the act, says David Beebe of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. About 70 percent of those applications were approved.
"There was a tendency, when they settled in a community, for other people from the village they came from to join them," says Muñiz. "For instance, Mill City had very few Hispanic students, and then they woke up one year and they had 10, and then the next year they had 20, and then 30. Now, there's a little community beginning." (See article, Citizens of the World.)
Among Mill City's recent Hispanic arrivals are Maria Martinez and her husband. Five years ago, they abandoned their lettuce-cutting jobs in California to join a relative in the Santiam Canyon's timbered hills. Martinez splits her working hours between the classroom, where she's a bilingual aide, and the Mexican restaurant she runs with her husband. The couple came north, she says, to give wider horizons to their three children. She hopes to see them pursue careers in law, architecture, and medicine. "I want them to be something," she says. "That's the reason we are working so hard, for them to have a good future--so we can have the financial means to send them all to college. They're going to go to college."
Towns like Mill City--and, by extension, the rural schools that serve them--have felt the impact of the Hispanic influx most strongly. Urban Hispanic populations are growing fast, too. But in contrast to Asian and Black students, who typically attend inner-city and urban-fringe schools, Hispanics tend to cluster in outlying areas, particularly in small towns, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And while city schools usually enroll a broad cross section of ethnic groups, country schools traditionally have been less mixed. "Small rural towns throughout the country are grappling with an influx of Hispanic...immigrants who have followed jobs to these traditionally homogeneous settings," Education Week noted in January 1995.
Children with recent roots in Mexico or other Latin American countries often come to Northwest schools speaking only Spanish. Others speak indigenous languages such as Mixtec. Northwest schools' responses to the newcomers differ as widely as Oregon's wet Willamette Valley differs from its dry high desert. Some turn away Spanish-speaking kids who have no address but the family truck.
"We have principals who don't want to serve these kids," says Merced Flores of the Oregon Department of Education. "They say they are not citizens of this country. Some principals are not cognizant of the laws, and in some cases they refuse to know what the law is."
Migrant children in Idaho, too, have been spurned at the schoolhouse door, says Anita Brunner of the Idaho Department of Education. "We get reports of older kids going into high school and being told, "You've come in too late. You're not going to get credit for this semester, so why bother at all?'" she says. "It's a nightmare, and you can hardly believe that any educator or front-office person would say that kind of thing. But apparently it still goes on."
Refusing to admit undocumented children violates a 1982 landmark Supreme Court decision, Plyler vs. Doe. The justices ruled that K-12 schools cannot deny admission to children because of their immigration status. Making sure that language-minority students--U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike--have meaningful access to education is a top priority for the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The OCR recently stepped up its enforcement of "Lau" cases--shorthand for Lau vs. Nichols, the unanimous 1974 Supreme Court decision saying schools must take steps to ensure that language-minority students can comprehend instruction. In the three years between 1991 and 1994, the OCR's Northwest office handled 21 language-minority equity cases average of seven per year. Then, in the 1994-95 school year alone, the office opened 12 cases in the region--three investigations based on complaints and nine compliance reviews initiated by the OCR, according to Patricia Yates of the OCR.
Several districts agreed to correct the problems before the investigation began. Others were found in violation of students' civil rights. At one rural Northwest district, for instance, a citizen complained when a bilingual program for Hispanic students was cancelled. The civil rights office looked into the allegations. It found that 90 percent of the limited-English-proficient students whose files it reviewed were getting Ds or Fs in their academic courses, or they were one to eight years below grade level in academic achievement. One teacher with no training in English as a Second Language (ESL) methods was teaching ESL classes.
In another district, the OCR found that three of the four high school teachers interviewed were unaware that students enrolled in their classes spoke little or no English. Six of those students got Ds or Fs in those teachers' classes. The investigation also found that ESL services were reduced during the 1993-94 school year because the number of language-minority students--and, hence, the ESL teacher's class load--had increased. The ESL teacher reported that she knew language-minority students who had dropped out after junior high "because of a lack of follow-up and services at the high school level."
"Many, many schools have nothing for these kids, or they provide only limited services," says Carole Hunt of the Center for National Origin, Race, and Sex Equity operated by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. "Not much has changed since the Lau decision, and now we are going in the other direction. There's a big faction of folks who are against bilingual education."
Nationwide, more than a quarter of students with limited English proficiency get no special services, either to help them learn English or to understand what's being taught, according to the National Association for Bilingual Education. This neglect takes a heavy toll: Only half of Hispanic students graduate from high school. Their dropout rate is America's highest--twice that of Blacks and four times that of non-Hispanic Whites.
In earlier eras, immigrants with little education and limited English could land decent jobs in trades or manufacturing. No more. Without advanced skills in communication and technology, today's immigrants will be trapped in low-wage, dead-end jobs. Even in the Santiam Canyon--located, in the words of one Oregon educator, "out in Timbuktu"--a lumber mill uses computerized laser equipment to slice thin sheets of veneer from raw logs. The plant's 25 Hispanic workers, recently hired for entry-level jobs sorting and grading veneer, will need good English skills to move off the green chain into better-paying, high-tech positions, says plant Vice President Rob Freres. Just down the road from the veneer plant is the True Value hardware store. Even this business, the local source of bolts and screwdrivers, is computerized. Owner Tim Kirsch recently hired a Hispanic man who, Kirsch said, was eager, hardworking, and reliable. But after a few weeks, the employee sent word he wouldn't be coming back: He couldn't master the computer skills he needed for the job.
Second-grader Ascension Tavarez listens to a bilingual teaching assistant at Gates Elementary School. Photo by Jay Reiter.
Even as the numbers of language-minority students rise, the dollars for serving them diminish. Schools can draw on two pots of federal money for meeting the needs of kids with limited English proficiency: Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Emergency Immigrant Education Act. "Funding for these programs has not kept pace with the increase in eligible populations," notes a 1994 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office. According to that report, Limited English Proficiency: A Growing and Costly Educational Challenge Facing Many School Districts, the $192 million appropriated for Title VII in 1990 was 40 percent less in real dollars than the 1980 appropriation. Funding under the emergency act dropped from $86 per student in 1984 to $29 in 1992. For migrant students, additional money is available under Title VI.
But some schools don't apply for the funds that are available. "Quite a few districts have limited-English-proficient kids but haven't applied for reimbursement dollars," says Flores. "There are several schools that won't identify the kids and some have said, "We can take care of that child ourselves.'"
Despite balky administrators and shaky programs lingering at some Northwest schools, attitudes and practices are beginning to change, Flores maintains. Asserting that most educators "are concerned about the kids," he says the nation's growing need for a highly skilled labor force makes it essential that educators bring language-minority students into the school-reform loop. Preparing Hispanic and other immigrant children to be equal players in the economic, social, and political life of the community is a job everyone must shoulder together, he says.
David Rosalez agrees. One of six Distinguished Educators helping Oregon schools design schoolwide reform programs, Rosalez has seen a shifting outlook in the small town of Ontario on the state's eastern fringe, where he makes his home. He says Ontario's residents, educators, and business owners have come to recognize the benefits of providing solid schooling to all future citizens and consumers in the community. (See article, Two Worlds in One Classroom).
"If we don't educate these children, who's going to pay for our retirement?" Rosalez asks. "Who will be the leaders of the community? If we don't educate them, are we promoting two different social classes? And if so, who's going to support those at the bottom?
"The best bet," he says, "is educating them and making them productive citizens."
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