Migrant Farm Workers

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Imagine a family member working as a farmworker in the fields all day long, short breaks, no lunch, no water and under extreme heat for more than 12 hours a day. This is the usual day for a farmworker. Farm workers are migrant families hired for agricultural work on a farm and travel across states and leave their home to seek work harvesting crops. Some challenges migrant families face include intensive work hours that require hazardous tool, poverty and a low education.Though mainstream society does not recognize the existence of migrant farm workers and their children, the Migrant Education program sets out to provide services to these families and helps the children in specific who often face the consequences of being on the road with their…show more content…
A migrant student is that who moves along with their parents and travels long distances, normally from state to state, to work in agricultural farms (Green, The Undocumented). “One of the most significant causes of low educational achievement is the fact that juvenile farmworkers simply spend too much time on the job.” In order to bring food to the table, each family member of a migrant family must contribute and lend a hand ( “Migrant Students”). Some children are forced to work alongside their parents in the fields due to the poverty in which they live in. Along with poverty, these families move from state to state to find work. Moreover, “Migrant farmworkers have been called the poorest of the working poor” (Branz-Spall, Rosenthal, and Wright “Children of the Road: Students, Our Nation’s Most Mobile Population). The majority of migrant farmworkers are from ages fifteen to forty-four (Green, The…show more content…
Mobility is the ability of these migrant families to move or travel from place to place. Due to mobility, migrant students can lose two to three weeks of school (Michael, The Clearing House). According to The Journal of Negro Education, “the law defines the term of a migratory child to mean: a child who is or whose parent, spouse, or guardian is, a migratory agricultural worker, that has moved from one school district to another; in a state that is comprise of a single district, has moved from one administrative area to another within such district; or resides in a school district of more than 15,00 square miles.” The common states in which migrant families reside are Texas and Florida, in the West it is California. Migrant families from Florida move North depending on the crops and weather and return home in the late fall and return again the early summer before school starts. To ensure the education of children of migrant families, the Migrant Education Program in some occasions sends out their best teachers to follow these children as they travel from location to location. Migrant students move in the middle of a school semester, and live in multiple places temporary which is why some migrant students are behind in school and unable to catch up. One of the programs linked to the

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