Thread: MI: Immigration laws may have caused summer enrollment drop

Immigration laws may be behind summer program enrollment drop

Friday, June 22, 2007
By Kym Reinstadler
CHRONICLE NEWS SERVICE
Directors of school migrant programs are hopeful next month's blueberries and midseason crops will bring an influx of harvesters' children to boost lower-than-normal enrollments.

Harvests of asparagus and strawberries revealed labor shortages at West Michigan farms, so migrant program directors are bracing for low enrollments in summer courses, many of which started this week.

But the real impact of low turnout might be a year off, because federal funding for next year's programs will be based on this summer's enrollment. If enrollment increases in 2008, money will be in short supply.

Declining enrollment seems likely, based on projections this week out of a migrant receiving center in Hope, Ark., said Pedro Martinez, who runs Michigan's biggest summer migrant program for the Van Buren Intermediate School District. That program starts Monday.

Fewer migrant workers with families say they are traveling to West Michigan.

"We're suspicious the immigration issue is why our numbers are down 35 percent," said Sherryl Martin, of Mason County Schools, which started its six-week summer program June 11. "Some families we've been serving for years and years just haven't showed up. We suspect it's because of immigration status, but we won't know for sure because schools don't ask."

Federal laws guarantee a free public education to every child, regardless of whether the parents are here legally.

Enrollment in summer migrant programs run by West Ottawa and Fennville schools also looks like it will be low, but directors say it cannot all be blamed on the latest crackdown on undocumented workers.

Children are eligible for migrant services for 36 months after a parent's move for agricultural work, but many districts determined eligibility strictly on parents' say-so until three years ago, when the state started hiring interviewers to ask questions.

Since then, enrollment in Fennville's summer migrant program has dropped to half, Migrant Director Alice Huyser said.

She said moving the program to South Haven last summer also may have contributed to the decline.

"It's especially hard for us to gauge enrollment because there are no migrant camps in Fennville to recruit from," said Huyser, whose seven-week summer program starts Tuesday.

Eighty kindergartners through eighth-graders whose parents work in north Holland nurseries lost their eligibility for services through West Ottawa Public Schools under Department of Migrant Education rules because their families have remained in the district for three years.

"Our migrant population appears to be settling out, finding year-round work in factories," said Denise Archer, director of West Ottawa's six-week migrant program, which opened Wednesday. "The other part of the trend we're seeing is that nurseries are hiring single men, or men whose families aren't traveling with them."

Migrant workers also are settling in the Hart area, where there's year-round work in a couple of food processing operations, said Michelle Mattson, whose migrant enrollment at Hart Public Schools has fallen over the past three summers.

Grant Public Schools Migrant Director John Klever anticipates enrollment will be down because of eligibility and immigration issues, but says the picture won't be clear until mid-July, when the harvest of field crops and orchards start.

©2007 Muskegon Chronicle
© 2007 Michigan Live. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.mlive.com/news/chronicle/ind ... xml&coll=8

GREED HOLDS NO BOUNDS!!!!!!!!!!

What they don't want to say, is that the "labor shortage" at the farms probably means that the kids will be in the fields picking produce. The director of the migrant workers school know this.

Why is he afraid to mention the real cause of low enrollment? Why is he supporting the forced labor of illegal alien kids?

I am always amazed and disgusted by those who will hide their true agenda behind a false front of charity.