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Monday, May 30, 2005 · Last updated 12:22 p.m. PT

Feds work to create nationwide system for tracking migrant students

By REBECCA BOONE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BOISE, Idaho -- Some of Caldwell School District's students arrive in the middle of the year, with dust from California's farmland still clinging to their shoes. Others leave before the year ends, headed south to hoe beets or change sprinkler lines.

For many children in migrant families, school is more like a way station than a final destination.

Now a proposal from the U.S. Department of Education would track those students as they travel along traditional migrant routes, ensuring that school records follow them wherever they may go.

"The challenge with migrant children, because they are so mobile, there is no consistency in terms of their education," said Albert Pacheco, the executive director of the Idaho Migrant Council.

Jesus de Leon, a federal programs administrator for the Caldwell schools and a child of migrant workers, knows firsthand how difficult it is for migrant children to accrue the credits needed to graduate.

"We went to school from November to March," said de Leon, who credits his education for helping him escape a life in the fields. "We left from south Texas in March and followed a big loop - In Idaho, we'd do hops, beets, corn, then to Utah and Colorado for tomatoes. In west Texas, we'd pick cotton and be back home by November."

The federal government's last attempt at such a program grew so unwieldy over time that it was ultimately canned in 1995, and most states now have their own such tracking programs - that may or may not be compatible with a federal system.

"With the passage of No Child Left Behind, Congress required that the department - for the purpose of electronically exchanging health and education information - link the existing state migrant student information systems," said Alex Goniprow with the federal Office of Migrant Education.

The effort, officials hope, will allow schools to immediately access students' test scores, class credits and even immunization records.

"There was a tendency for schools to say, 'Well, I don't know if we're going to test them because they're going to leave in three weeks,'" said Irene Chavolla, Idaho's migrant education coordinator. "But right now, with all the testing under the No Child Left Behind Act, it's really important for the schools to know where those students were getting help."

Roughly 11,300 of Idaho's nearly 250,000 students are migrants, their families moving at least once in three years across district lines to find agricultural or other seasonal work. Many move every season, and some move every two or three weeks.

Idaho attempts to track those children from school district to school district through a password-protected Web site. When it was first developed three years ago, the site allowed any school official with the password to update students' information. But so many officials accidentally deleted information or made other mistakes that the Idaho Department of Education shut down the site to make changes, Chavolla said. The newest version allows only eight people in the state to add or change a student's information, she said.

"The Web site's still not fully functional but it's better than before," said de Leon. "I think it's a very positive thing for policy makers to say there has to be alignment in services between states. But I don't know if people understand the complexity of keeping a record system statewide, much less nationwide."

Though Idaho can track the students once they enter the state, their records are often left behind when they leave to work in Washington, Texas or other states. When they return to Idaho, he said, they may have gaps that can be difficult to track down.

Schools are prohibited from sharing the information in the migrant tracking program with other agencies, including the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Chavolla said, and many migrant parents and students have embraced the program.

"There are concerns that students are over-immunized and over-tested because these families may lose their immunization cards when they move around so much. This allows them another way of proving that students have been immunized," she said.

State officials will soon travel to Washington D.C. to explain Idaho's system to federal officials, Chavolla said.

The U.S. Department of Education hopes to award a contract to develop the national system by the end of this summer, Goniprow said. For now, he said, it is tough to estimate how much a system may cost or how it would be paid for.