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We are excited to present the culmination of our steadfast commitment to migrant communities - our recently published Community Assessment Report.This report, a testament to the relentless perseverance of our Community Collaboration Department, provides an insightful snapshot of the distinctive challenges and prospects intrinsic to the communities we proudly serve. We do this assessment annually, but only on this large, in-depth scale once every five years.
The 2024 report offers invaluable insights, helping us fine-tune our programs to address the dynamic needs of migrant children and their families. Our methodical approach to analyzing crucial data and engaging with community members allows our organization to cultivate an environment conducive for growth, support, and empowerment for those who depend on us.
We are intentional about where we invest in communities to ensure we are providing services where there is the most need, but also to ensuring that our educational programs are accessible, culturally responsive, and tailored to fulfill the evolving needs of families and communities.
What is a community assessment?
The community assessment is a crucial component of program planning within all Head Start programs. Due to its significance, the Office of Head Start (OHS) has established specific requirements for Head Start programs to adhere to when conducting a community assessment. OHS mandates that Head Start programs utilize data that outlines the strengths, needs, and resources of the community.
Much of this data includes demographics, information on other child development facilities, community resources, and strengths present within the community. Our report, produced from the most recent assessment, highlights the substantial progress and transformations that have occurred within the organization.
Community assessment overview
The 2024 Community Assessment Report offers key insights that guide our decision-making process. Here are some highlights:
Demographic trends: We serve a diverse population engaged in various agricultural sectors, from harvesting vegetables to working on poultry farms and aquaculture. Most families we serve are Hispanic/Latino (84%), with a growing number of Haitian families (8%). The remaining families are White (3%) and African American or Multi-racial (5%). Language diversity is also significant, with Spanish as the primary language (78%), followed by Haitian Creole (11%), and English (8%).
Family Profile: A significant portion of our families are single-parent households (39%), and many parents have less than a high school education. These factors are crucial in shaping our programs to provide the necessary support, especially in literacy and single-parent resources.
Grantee-wide findings:
More families qualify for Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) services as seasonal agricultural workers than as migrant workers, due to the availability of year-round work.
Staff shortages, particularly in bus driver positions, have impacted MSHS enrollment.
The use of the H-2A program by agricultural employers is expanding, affecting labor availability.
Trends from all program areas:
Family Services: A large percentage of families (40%) are single-parent households. Single-parent households have fewer protective factors and may need more support. This highlights the need to adapt family services to provide support to single-parent households.
Health Services: Data reflects significant barriers to children receiving needed dental services due to a constellation of factors including lack of dental service providers and a family’s inability to transport children to appointments.
Disability Services: ECMHSP families are experiencing longer wait times to receive services due to Early Intervention programs and Local Education Agencies being short-staffed therefore causing evaluation appointments to be scheduled for three or more months out, leaving children without needed services. Services are
often not available, or children are not eligible; in these cases, ECMHSP pays for needed services; ECMHSP also pays for services while waiting for evaluations.
Mental Health Services: The majority of ECMHSP children are now US-born, and there is evidence that families are losing the protective factors typically possessed by recent immigrants and now have similar risk factors as local populations.
Nutrition Services: Evaluating the data from 2016 through 2023 indicates fluctuations in the percentages of children categorized as overweight or obese for their age, without a consistent pattern of increase or decrease suggesting that efforts to reduce the rates of childhood obesity in ECMHSP children have not been successful.
Education Services: School readiness trends, in general, reflect the fact that ECMHSP continues to prepare children for success in the public school system. The greatest gains were made in Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Children in classrooms where the KidSpark STEM curriculum supplement was implemented made notable gains in cognition.
Transportation Services: During the project period, ECMHSP has substantially increased the number of children who benefit from transportation services. In the program year 2019-20, 257 children were transported by 34 Bus Drivers. Three years later, in 2022-23, the number of children transported more than doubled to 870 children, and ECMHSP employed 46 Bus Drivers.
Impact of early childhood services
ECMHSP operates Migrant and Seasonal Head Start services across 43 educational campuses in ten states. Notably, three campuses in Florida -- Palmetto, Jennings, and Wauchula -- also receive Migrant Early Head Start (EHS) funding to serve children from birth to six years old. This integration ensures that the youngest members of farmworker families receive early and essential educational support, reflecting ECMHSP’s commitment to comprehensive care from infancy through early childhood.
“Our goal is to provide stability and high-quality education to children of farmworker families, ensuring they have the same opportunities for success as any other child,” stated Maria C. Garza, CEO of ECMHSP.
The dedication of ECMHSP’s staff, many of whom have served the organization for their entire careers, is a testament to the impact and importance of their work. In the 2022-23 program year alone, ECMHSP employed 1,326 individuals, including 312 current or former MSHS parents, emphasizing the community-centered nature of the organization.
To achieve our goal of high-quality early care and learning, we continuously adapt our locations and service designs to meet the unique needs of migrant and seasonal farmworker families.
A family’s harvesting disruption changed their lives
The parents of the young children we serve play a fundamental role in shaping our programs. They're a part of the decision-making process when it comes to the nature and operation of our organization. Parents who participate in the Policy Council experience the firsthand challenges that farmwork can bring, whether that’s due to technological, economic, or environmental changes that affect how they provide for their families.
Our Policy Council President, Faustina Vasquez, has a unique story about how a little bug changed their lives with its disruption of harvesting oranges.
“We are Floridians who have converted into a migrant family because of a little something called greening. Oranges are what used to define Florida. For God's sake, it is on the license plate!” said Vasquez. “I come from a long line of family members whose lives revolve around the citrus industry. My grandfather and father, along with my uncles would pick oranges in the late 80s to early 90s.”
Occasionally, when her father couldn't arrange child care, he would bring young Faustina along with him. Her "job" was to gather the oranges that her father, uncles, and their team would accidentally drop on the ground. As third-generation farmworkers, Vasquez and her husband are extremely knowledgeable about the crops they have cared for and harvested. Thirty and 40 years ago, “the trees were bushy, the greenest green and they would literally hang from the weight of juicy and delicious oranges. It wouldn't take long to fill up the orange barrels, which would be $6-$9 at the time,” she said.
“Then my father found work as a grove caretaker along with all my other uncles. To this day he continues to try and take care of the remaining orange groves. My husband made a living off the orange industry, as well,” continued Vasquez. “We would make as much (money) as we could during the season which would run from September or October until June. Those other months were long since we always looked forward to our source of income, which was only oranges, at that time.”
However, they started to notice that there was less and less production of oranges. As an adult, she and her husband had also relied on orange picking to earn a living, but a little bug brought the behemoth industry to its knees.
Citrus greening, aslo known as Huanglongbing (HLB), is a bacterial infection that affects citrus plants and is considered one of the most serious citrus diseases in the world. It's spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny insect that feeds on citrus leaves, eating away at the tree from the inside out, like a cancer. Once infected, the disease degrades the fruit and slowly kills the tree, usually within a few years.
Leaves start to not generate or are malformed, and the fruit does not stay on the tree long enough to enlarge or even ripen. There's no cure for citrus greening, and it poses no health threat to humans or animals. Since citrus greening was first detected in Florida in 2005, orange yield drastically decreased to almost being nonexistent.
“A slow decline has forced farmers to call it quits and pull the trees out from the root.” Vasquez reflected on the changing landscape of orange groves, “It is a sad sight to see now that what used to be acres and acres of groves are now open land, up for sale.”
Many huge farming companies have shut down and laid off hundreds to thousands of employees. In 2008, the disease reduced citrus production by several percent and threatened the state's $9.3 billion citrus industry. It has also spread to other citrus areas and poses a threat to the entire U.S. citrus industry. Juice plants are to follow next if alternative forms of income are not figured out.
“Around 2013, my husband took a leap of faith to do what his dad used to do in the past when he was a child in migrating to NC. We come to harvest bell peppers, squash, blackberries, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and watermelons,” said Vasquez. She was a dumper on the top of the bell pepper and sweet potato trucks on the rural NC farms.
“We are here for six months and return to Florida in December, staying there for four to six months, depending on cabbage season,” she continued. “We go back and forth. It is hard with three young kids, but this is how we keep our bills paid and the future bright.”
Education is a priority for her and her family to attain a better life, with more stability. Vasquez’s husband dropped out of school in the ninth grade. She is now a Registered Nurse, working towards becoming a Nurse Practitioner, through graduate studies at Purdue University. Outside of her time in school and caring for her family, Vasquez is also making a difference in advising our organization’s Board of Directors and leading the parent Policy Council.
At ECMHSP, our commitment to delivering the highest quality services remains unwavering, providing a home at our educational campuses for each child and family to root themselves in. With a strong, active family engagement, we can help ensure that the future is, indeed, bright.
About ECMHSP
East Coast Migrant Head Start Project was established in 1974 through a grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Currently, ECMHSP operates in 43 Educational Campuses across ten states providing holistic, high-quality early childhood education services for approximately 3,000 farmworker children between 6 weeks to 6 years old. For more information, visit https://www.ecmhsp.org/.
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