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Education Is Key To Success Story

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By RONNIE BLAIR rblair@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 22, 2008

DADE CITY - The map in Georgina Rivera-Singletary's office at Pasco High School serves both as a reminder and a conversation piece.

Rivera-Singletary, an assistant principal at the high school, grew up in a migrant family and traveled throughout the eastern United States, working the fields in nine states from childhood into adulthood.

On her map, dots pinpoint the states where the migrant lifestyle took her: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York.

Her family lived in labor camps and picked oranges, apples, strawberries, corn, beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, peaches, pears, watermelon, cabbages and most memorably nectarines, a favorite treat that she would pluck from the trees and eat right there in the fields.

For a long time, Rivera-Singletary seemed destined to live that lifestyle forever. Two weeks before her 15th birthday, she dropped out of school. She became a teenage bride and started raising a family. The fields continued to call and she continued to answer that call.

At least until the day she decided the life she had known wasn't enough. Knowing an education would provide more opportunities, she earned a GED in the late 1980s and was able to get a clerical job.

That was just the start. She enrolled in college at Pasco-Hernando Community College in 1991 and the degrees followed. Now she is working on a doctorate.

"Even though there were a lot of things working against me, what was inside me was stronger," Rivera-Singletary, 43, said.

Others took note of the story of a migrant worker and dropout who rose to become a high school assistant principal. Rivera-Singletary is in Naples today for the annual Migrant Education Conference.

There she is to be honored as the 2008 Florida Migrant Success Story of the Year. The award is presented by the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Migrant Interstate Program.

Not Used To Publicity

Rivera-Singletary is proud of the award, but also a bit uneasy about the attention. Principal Pat Reedy put her name on the marquee in front of the high school. He let parents know about her accomplishments through an automated telephone message.

"I'm not used to publicity like that," she said.

Somewhere inside her, she said, is still that shy migrant girl who struggled to fit in as her family moved three or four times a year.

"I felt like an outsider everywhere I went," Rivera-Singletary said. "As an adolescent, those things weigh on you. I wanted to learn, but I was frustrated at always being the new person in the classroom."

Rivera-Singletary, who was born in Homestead, is of Puerto Rican descent on her father's side and Mexican on her mother's side.

Rivera-Singletary considers all 1,350 students at Pasco High her students, but her background gives her a natural rapport with the 27 percent who are Hispanic.

"It was a rough life for me when I was in school," she said. "I'm very passionate about my role as an administrator."

Rivera-Singletary also works closely with Hispanic parents.

Once a month, Pasco High hosts a meeting with those parents, an event that has proved popular. At the most recent meeting, 75 families were represented, Rivera-Singletary said.

Some of the parents don't speak English. In the past, that communications barrier kept parents away, but that has become less of a problem at the high school.

"Something happened and that wall has been broken down," Rivera-Singletary said.

Rivera-Singletary credits her success in part to a number of mentors who gave her advice and encouragement over the years. Among them is Steve Cox, principal at Moore-Mickens Education Center, where she worked as a counselor in the Farmworker Jobs and Education Program.

When Cox learned she planned to pursue her master's degree at Saint Leo University, he suggested she consider becoming a school administrator.

"I saw a very intelligent young lady, and I saw somebody I thought had a lot of potential to be a school administrator," Cox said.

She's An Inspiration

Rivera-Singletary's story is one that could inspire students who also face obstacles, he said.

"I think any time you can tell people, 'This is where I came from and this is where I am and you can do it, too,' it does open some eyes," Cox said.

Rivera-Singletary's life these days holds little in common with the life she knew growing up in the fields. She has three grown children. She is divorced from her first husband and five years ago married Lamonte Singletary.

She is now in her fourth year as an assistant principal at Pasco High. She hasn't toiled as a migrant worker since 1987, when she picked her last piece of fruit in a Pennsylvania apple orchard.

She has no regrets about the lifestyle she once had, though. If circumstances required it, she would return to the fields and do it all over again.

One day not so long ago Rivera-Singletary was in a class when a professor asked whether it was all right to tell people they are oppressed. Singletary gave a lot of thought to that question.

She decided that oppression is in the eye of the beholder.

"If you had told me when I was a migrant worker that I was oppressed, I didn't know I was oppressed," Rivera-Singletary said. "It was the only life I knew."

Reporter Ronnie Blair can be reached at (813) 948-4218.

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