Creative Funding

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Every year, the Woodmore School in northwestern Ohio holds annual community garage sales so migrant families can buy necessary household items for no more than 25 cents each. Because the migrant communities in Woodville and nearby Elmore spend only a few months per year in the Midwest as they harvest tomatoes and cucumbers (known as "pickles" in the fields), working families are in constant need of cheap, temporary household items.

"We collect tons of things they could use here, but nothing so valuable that they couldn't leave it behind when they return south," says Woodmore Superintendent Jane Garling, who visited the migrant communities and tutored in the homes a couple of times a week. Whenever she drove up, women would yell that the "gringa" had arrived, and they'd run out to her car with soft drinks.

Garling's interest in outreach extended even further. She approached local companies that employed migrant workers and asked them to help out, either by donating money to the district's education programs or by providing housing to migrant families. At Garling's encouragement, Heinz once donated $60,000 a year for nearby Bettsville's pilot migrant education program. The school also contacts families before they arrive to make sure parents and students come as prepared as possible.

The effort pays off one student at a time. Silvia Mata, whose family spent time in Texas, Florida and the Midwest during each school year, had missed countless class hours over the years. Once, she had to leave a Florida school while her grade was learning multiplication. By the time she reached Texas, her classmates were already adept at long division. Now finished with high school, Mata recalls how some teachers assigned research papers to migrant students who had no access to the television, the Internet or even libraries.

Too often, work in the fields seemed to trump education. When Jose Villa, Ohio State University's assistant vice provost for minority affairs, visited Woodmore to encourage migrant students to consider college, Mata was the only one who showed up for a meeting – rebelling at her father's insistence on finishing the "pickle" harvest that autumn evening.

Villa understood the lack of attendees. He had been a migrant himself, beating the odds and attending college. Mata eventually did the same, graduating last spring from Ohio State. She now teaches summer school at Woodmore once a week to migrant students.