But those were the good years. Bridgeport was never a wealthy
community, and when the money leaves, there’s little to fall back
on. With apple prices low and no new dam projects in sight, the
median household income now lingers around $25,500. Thirty percent
of the population and more than 40 percent of the children live
below the poverty line. According to the U.S. Census, of the 2,060
residents of Bridgeport, more than half today are Hispanic.
The newest children in the community come with migrant families
either directly from Mexico or from California through the
Wenatchee area, according to the Migrant Student Data and
Recruitment Office in Sunnyside, Washington. Poverty is just one
hurdle. They also struggle with language and with fitting school
into a migrant lifestyle.
Superintendent Gene Schmidt thinks about that constantly. He
frets about how his students are living, eating, staying
healthy—how their parents view the school, how the community views
the families.
He tries to get a head start on the day by being one of the
first on campus. But at seven one morning last fall, he was
preceded by a third-grader who had been dropped off by a parent
heading to work and had already crisscrossed the parking lot and
playground twice, hungry for the companionship of classmates.
Schmidt, buttoned up in his half-sleeve shirt and earnest brown
tie, noted the boy and then headed for his office. As children
filtered in and the din on the playground reached a perfect
pandemonium pitch, he sped back to his car with a teacher in tow.
Schmidt fights on the front lines of truancy, trying to bring in as
many of the community’s children as he can, even if it means going
out from time to time and rounding them up himself. Some families
are just so wrapped up in getting by, they don’t have time to
realize the value of keeping their children in school, he says.
The district learned its lesson in the late 1990s, when prices
for agriculture commodities plummeted and the dropout rate
increased to 58 percent, as students left school to find work in
nearby orchards and packing houses to help support their
families.
Schmidt, who hired on at Bridgeport seven years ago, led the
effort to bring the students back, promising their families that
they would be getting skills that would serve them beyond fruit
work. For a small district on a meager budget, that wasn’t an easy
promise to keep. At its lowest point in the ’90s, the whole
district owned only two computers.
But then the district started writing grant proposals, at least
10 a month. The philosophy: no grant was too small or too large to
attempt.
Today there are computers at the fingertips of every high-school
student. No one leaves Nancy Fisher’s ’78 high-school business
class without computer training. Many of the kids are building and
managing Web pages for themselves and others in town.
Looking to districts in California and Texas that have been
dealing with similar issues for decades, Schmidt, Pointer, and
others in the district reoriented the schools to better serve the
changing student population. Bridgeport started offering elementary
programs in Spanish during the summer. Then the district opened a
day-long kindergarten program with teachers who speak both English
and Spanish. The tots leave versed in the alphabet and able to
count to 20.
Free breakfasts and lunches provide another incentive to come to
school. The menu has been changed to include rice and beans,
adjusting for the palate of the student body. The school has also
hired America Reyes, an exchange teacher from Mexico who works
alongside the local teachers in the high school.
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