The Schooling Of Migrant Children

They attend more schools in a year than some students do in a lifetime. Yet they have the lowest test scores, the highest dropout rate and, surprisingly, the highest incidence of death by drowning.

They are the children of fruit and vegetables pickers who follow the crop

from Connecticut to New Jersey to Florida and then, perhaps, back to Puerto Rico. Their struggles with the language and the culture are intensified by the almost constant movement of their parents.

As New Jersey's role as an agricultural center has diminished, so has the state's migrant population, said Howard Shelton, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. This summer, the state will spend $560,000 in federal money to educate about 3,500 migrant children.

About 80 youngsters attend Gloucester County's Migrant Summer Program, which is housed in the Thomas E. Bowe Elementary School but run by the Gloucester County Educational Services Commission. Another 130 migrant youngsters from the southern end of Camden County attend summer classes at the Hammonton Elementary School in Atlantic County. About 95 students from the northern part of Camden County attend summer classes at the Davis School in Camden City.

The schools offer a four- or five-week, full-day program for students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grades. But it is more than a basic skills program.

Breakfast and lunch are free; so is medical and dental care. A computerized record-keeping system ensures that a child who attends school in Glassboro today will be placed in the right reading group in Tallahassee next week.

Some migrant students have attended as many as 15 schools in five years and, despite the best efforts and intentions of the state Department of Education, many migrant students' average attendance is only 120 days of classes a year. The state requirement for all students is 180 days annually.

The computerized records-transfer system, started about 15 years ago, has improved each school district's ability to move a migrant child into a classroom swiftly, said Dorothy Van Horn, who has been coordinating the Gloucester County program for nine years.

All available data on a student - from immunization dates to reading level - is fed into a central computer in Little Rock, Ark., so that anywhere the child goes, the records follow.