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Hillsborough fields yield top students

Durant High School grads get Migrant Scholars of the Year.

By JOSE CARDENAS
Published November 22, 2005

TAMPA - Emanuel Lucas once traversed the tomato fields of Florida while working with his farmworker parents.

The 18-year-old also traveled to Alabama and Georgia where he helped his parents harvest and sell the crops at flea markets.

"It's back-breaking," he said. "You come out of those fields green because of the fertilizer."

Now, Lucas traverses the landscaped campus of the University of South Florida where, instead of working a farm, he's a freshman majoring in biomedical sciences.

Lucas and 18-year-old Erica Reynoso - who is at an Army Reserves boot camp in Missouri - graduated from Durant High School in Plant City in May. Now, the Florida Department of Education has named them its male and female Exemplary Migrant Scholars for 2005.

Each year, the state honors outstanding migrant students - though none from Hillsborough County have ever received the state's top honor - as well as teachers, administrators and parents who work with the 50,000-plus migrant students in Florida.

To educators, Lucas and Reynoso symbolize a degree of success for students who face atypical barriers to make it to college.

Lucas, for example, went to Durant all four years but he traveled on weekends and during the summer, living in his father's truck when they were away.

"The migrant students, they follow the crops," said teacher Jim Courtney, Durant's migrant advocate, who nominated both students. "They're playing catch up all the time."

Hillsborough County had never gotten the top recognition for migrant students, said Carmen Sorondo, the district's migrant program supervisor.

Lucas and Reynoso will be formally recognized in the coming months during the annual convention where educators gather to learn about issues affecting migrant students, said Oscar Olguin, a program specialist with the Florida Migrant Interstate Program, which coordinates the awards.

The students who won last year were given scholarships and cars, said Olguin. This year, the awards have not been determined.

Lucas's parents - Victoria, 40; and Anastacio, 39 - came from Mexico separately as teenagers.

They worked the fields of Texas, California and Michigan before they came to Plant City around the time Lucas was born.

Lucas graduated from Durant with a 4.1 GPA and an SAT score of 1120. Besides English and Spanish, he speaks French and played on the varsity football team as an offensive guard.

It's not lost on him that his parents only took him to work after school, weekends and during the summer.

"For me, I got lucky," said Lucas. "My father kept me in school. There's families that tell their kids to go work with them (during the school day). They don't see the need for an education."

Reynoso had to learn English in elementary school, according to one of her teachers. She helped her parents by working at a supermarket. She picked strawberries near Plant City and other crops in Ohio and Michigan.

But she graduated with a 4.9 GPA and took 29 honors classes. She expects to attend USF next semester, after boot camp.

"I like to use the quote that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did: "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country,"' Courtney said. "How many students with close to a 5.0 (GPA), knowing they are going to get scholarships, go into the military?"

This year, three Hillsborough school employees who work with migrant students also were recognized. That, too, has not happened before, Sorondo said.

Rogelio Villanueva is the migrant recruiter of the year for his efforts to bring migrant students into the school district.

Juanita Cannon was recognized for her social work that includes things such as finding medical care for migrant families.

And Ann Cranston, who oversees a program at USF that provides financial assistance to migrant students, is the migrant administrator of the year.

But for every migrant student who district staffers help go to college, there are others facing bigger barriers. For example, the illegal status of many students makes it difficult to enroll them in college and find them financial aid, said Cannon, 60.

Some of her hardest work involves trying to find the little medical care available for some farmworkers who don't qualify for public programs because of their illegal status.

"You see the difference that you are making in people's lives," said Cannon. "The award is just wonderful but working with the families is one of the greatest privileges that I could have had."

Back at USF, Lucas said his father's knowledge of plants inspired him to go into biology. Though working in the fields is hard, he thinks it's honest work.

"In case anything happened and my life doesn't go the way it's supposed to go, I'd do that kind of work," he said.

He wants to become a pediatrician and open a practice in Plant City. But to become a doctor, he knows he will have to improve his grades in college.

"The first couple of weeks I wasn't staying on task," he said. "Hopefully next semester I'm going to do it right. I know I'm going to do it right."

[Last modified November 22, 2005, 02:15:27]