An RCMA student paints her mother’s face during a family day to celebrate Mexican heritage. Photo by Julienne Gage.
By Julienne Gage, Senior Web Content Manager, ProgressReport.co
On a hot, steamy day in May, students at the Redlands Christian Migrant Association Wimauma Leadership Academy on Florida’s Gulf Coast gathered on campus with their parents for a Mexican cultural celebration. The day’s humidity did not stop them from painting Mexican and American flags on each other’s faces, or from marching around the schoolyard with handmade banners, masks, and instruments performing traditional Mexican music and shouting “Viva Mexico!”
It was a chance for these predominately migrant farmworker families to take a break from struggling to put food on the table and celebrate all who they are in a state where their community is often overshadowed by more historic Florida Latino populations such as Cubans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans. It was a chance to play and to learn about how the school program could lead to a better, more integrated life for their children. And on this day, there was another cause for celebration. Eighth grade graduation was just around the corner and 10 of this year’s 34 graduates would be getting full-ride scholarships to Cristo Rey, a private Catholic high school in Tampa which exposes underprivileged youth to the professional world by giving them one-day-a-week, accredited internships at area businesses. Additionally, each teen will have the opportunity to try out a different internship for each of their four years of high school.
But getting them this far was no easy task. All across the nation, data shows students are falling behind proficiency in math and reading even before they hit high school, and that’s especially true of Latino students. According to 2017 data for eighth graders gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 20% of Latinos were proficient in reading, compared to 45% among Whites, and in math, just 20% of Latinos were proficient, compared to 44% of Whites.