MANATEE -- With the help of $1.2 million of support, the teachers who work in child care centers for Florida farmworker families will get additional training to help them do a more professional job.
Redlands Christian Migrant Association operates 80 child care centers in Palmetto and elsewhere in Florida, and most of the teachers are from Hispanic immigrant-farmworker families.
“RCMA hires early childhood education teachers from within the migrant community and provides them with the necessary training to provide an educational learning environment for children while their parents work,” said Rebecca Burns, an assistant professor of English for speakers of other languages at the University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee.
“There is often a deep cultural gap between migrant families and traditional child care centers, and mothers aren’t willing to send their children to those programs,” Burns said.
In the 1960s, a Mennonite community in the Redlands area of Homestead started a program to keep farmworker children out of the fields.
“The kids were in danger of being bitten by snakes, run over by machinery or falling into holes. The mothers were leery of leaving their children with strangers,” Burns said.
The idea was born to hire teachers from the farmworker community, teachers who shared a culture and language with their young students.
The new funding support comes from a $771,000 grant from the Helios Education Foundation and in-kind contributions from the Redlands Christian Migrant Association.
The funding will help pay for instruction to help day care teachers improve their English language and literacy skills so that they can further benefit their students.
Starting April 1, the first group of 20 teachers will begin the 40-week Scaffold the Scholar program.
Through better-trained teachers, officials hope to enrich the vocabularies of the children, and provide better explanations of academic subjects.
“It comes more naturally when you have had a formal education,” Burns said.
Luz Corcuera, of Healthy Start in Manatee County, called it a wonderful idea.
“We have wonderful resources in the farmworker community with the intellectual ability and the understanding of the culture. If we give them the proper tools, they will do a wonderful job. We have to be innovative and try to think outside the box,” Corcuera said.
The project is a collaboration between USF Sarasota-Manatee and USF Polytechnic.
“RCMA teachers understand migrant children, the culture and lifestyle, but they often need help with English language acquisition and literacy,” Smita Mathur, assistant professor in the USF Polytechnic Division of Education and principal investigator of the project, said in a press release.
James A. Jones Jr., East Manatee editor, can be contacted at 745-7021.
