For as long as he can remember, Angel has missed the beginning of the school year in Texas because his family stays in North Dakota through the harvest. It's weather-dependent, so there's no hard end; all Angel knows is they'll head home to Texas sometime in October or November.
That flexibility is a big deal for employers who rely on seasonal workers to quickly harvest and process crops before they spoil. But it puts workers' kids — more than 300,000 of them nationwide, according to the Department of Education — in a tough situation: keeping their grades up in a system designed for students who start and finish the year at the same school.
Angel's summer school is funded by the Migrant Education Program. In 2017, the program put more than $350 million toward supporting kids whose parents move for agricultural and fisheries work. The money pays for, among other things, after school tutoring, academic advising and night classes for teens who've dropped out of school to work in the fields.
The program began in the 1960s, as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. The Department of Education doesn't track graduation rates for migrant students, but advocates and educators estimate that when the program first started, less than 10 percent graduated from high school.
Now they say that number is closer to 70 percent, which is still short of the national average.
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