Teachers assistant Filiberto Gorosquieta talks with fifth-grade teacher Brooke Fodor.

After graduating from high school, Filiberto Gorosquieta was working for his cousin’s company, hauling tents to outdoor parties. College wasn’t on the radar. But then he took a job assisting after-school programs at a local charter school in Immokalee, Fla. Something clicked.

Now Gorosquieta is a teacher’s assistant at Immokalee Community School, working mostly with students in fifth grade - a grade in which he says he once struggled academically. And he's taking classes at nearby Florida SouthWestern State College, with the goal of becoming a teacher himself.

Gorosquieta, who grew up in this farm community on the western edge of the Everglades, said he saw reflections of his own academic ups and downs in the students. Nearly 40 percent of them are children of migrant workers. Others have parents who work long hours in packing plants, or driving trucks, or commuting to nurseries and landscaping businesses. He recognized they needed not only a teacher, but a mentor who could relate.

"These kids make me who I am now," he said. "I wanted to give them the help that I didn't have."

Gorosquieta isn’t the only one who has felt the school’s gravitational pull. What started out as an extension of an early childhood program for farmworkers is now earning academic accolades, winning praise from other charter school operators and drawing passionate young teachers from near and far.

"You can just tell that it's more than a job … people invest a lot more than time here," said Adam Tweet, who moved last year from Minnesota to take a job teaching third grade. "We think people are called to work here."

Gorosquieta said the culture of the school is shaped by the community where he grew up. Parents, in many cases, cannot read English. They don't always have time to help their children with school work. But they enroll their children each fall, often at a financial price. And they instill in them the powerful idea that has fueled immigrants for generations – that education is the key to a better life.

"They get that push from home, from the parents," he said. "They want their kids to do better for themselves."

Immokalee Community School is one of three in Florida run by the Redlands Migrant Christian Association, a nonprofit devoted to uplifting farmworkers and their families. It is one of Florida's largest childcare providers, operating more than 75 centers from High Springs near Gainesville to Homestead south of Miami.

Barbara Mainster, its executive director, said RCMA opened its charter schools - the one in Immokalee, and two in eastern Hillsborough County near Tampa - after seeing its young children prepare to enter school and "not wanting to let go of them." Now students can stay in the network through middle school. (more…)