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- Dr. Ann Cranston-Gingras
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Ann Cranston-Gingras
LB: Today is February 21, 2006. I’m Lou Bowers and I’m interviewing Dr. Ann Cranston-Gingras of the USF Special Education Department in our College of Education. Ann, thanks for coming in and sharing with us some of your experiences here at USF. But before we get to USF and your life as a faculty member, what did you do professionally before coming to USF?
AC: I attended St. John’s University in New York City where I was studying to be a high school English teacher. I had worked a lot in special education throughout my life. I’m one of five children and my brother who was next after me was born with a significant physical disability. He was born at the time that children with physical disabilities were not allowed to go to school. It was believed that because he used a wheelchair he presented a fire hazard. He was fortunate enough to be part of a group of children that were selected to demonstrate that children with physical disabilities could go to school. And so my parents were very involved in the advocacy movement of the 1970s. I spent a lot of time around the field of special education, but I aspired to be a high school English teacher. So that was how I started my career. As soon as I started teaching high school English, I realized that I was drawn to children who had difficulties. Then I went to the State University of New York at Albany as part of a special program to help teachers become certified in special education. That started my professional career in special education. And I ended up at the University of South Florida for my doctoral program and that was really more of a personal decision. My husband and I got married right before that and my husband works for Shriners Hospital and they were building a new hospital on campus and he was selected to be the department head at the hospital, so I came to the University of South Florida.
LB: Great. So you’ve seen the university as a graduate student and as you completed your doctoral degree you were asked to stay on in a faculty position.
AC: Well, basically what happened was while I was a doctoral student I met Dr. Bob Dwyer, who has since retired. Bob Dwyer had worked with the children of migrant farm workers in some special programs. During the last year of my doctoral program, Bob was asked to direct a summer program for migrant children. And I was his graduate assistant, so we worked on it together. I became very, very interested in working with children from migrant farm worker families. I became aware of an opportunity for a federal project that would extend the work that we had done in the summer program. With the help of some colleagues, I wrote a grant for that project and it was funded. That’s how I started in a professional position at USF. A few years later I was asked to apply for a tenure track position and I’ve been doing that ever since.
LB: Now the date of that first grant, when was that?
AC: October 1987.
LB: The purpose of the grant, was it to help the education of children of the migrant workers?
AC: Right, that particular project was for children of migrant farm workers who had dropped out of school, and it was for children who had dropped out of school to work with their parents. The idea behind the grant was to help those children earn their high school diplomas and then transition them into post secondary education. Actually we still have that project today. So we had that project since 1987. About five and a half years ago, we added another federal project to help migrant students during their first year of college. That’s called the CAMP program and that’s very successful also.
LB: Was that continuous funding since ’87 for 19 years?
AC: We’ve had continuous funding since ’87. There have been different competitions for continuous funding.
LB: That’s quite a record because I know they don’t continue to fund programs, particularly at the federal level, unless they’re showing definite success.
AC: Well, we’ve actually been able to leverage those federal funds with a lot of private funds. That is one thing that has helped USF in its efforts to get more funding in the area of migrant education. I can tell you a little about some of the private projects that we’re working with since I guess the early ‘90s. We wanted to try to help the students that we were working with celebrate their success. As you know, the federal government will basically only pay for the essentials. We wanted to have graduation ceremonies with food. A lot of the students that participated in the program came from all over the state because it is a residential program. Their parents would drive to the award ceremonies and graduation ceremonies. Sometimes they would drive six or seven hours, and we wanted to be able to at least feed them when they came. So there was a woman working in the Dean’s Office at the time who was a full-time development officer. I can’t remember her name, but she was very helpful, and her name was Sue I believe. You might remember who she was. I can’t remember what her last name was. But she helped me put together a letter. We had an idea that if we wrote to some of the growers, because a lot of the student’s families worked for different growers around the state, it might work. We wrote to some of the growers explaining the situation and what we were trying to do so maybe we could raise some money. We wrote probably about 60 or 70 letters and just sent them out blindly, cold, explaining what we were trying to do. We received two or three letters back with checks. One of those letters was from Gary Wishnatzki who works in the strawberry industry. The other one came from Joey Esformes who works in the tomato industry. They actually sent us pretty generous checks and donations. For several years they helped support the program. Some others helped support the celebrations that we had.
When Joe Tomaino came on board as the development officer, I told him what we were doing and he got the idea that we really could raise a lot more money to help support the work in migrant education. And so he helped along with Steve Permuth, who was the Dean at the time. We went and we talked to a lot of strawberry and tomato growers from around the state, and we were able to start some private endowments to help students from migrant families become teachers. Now, those endowments have grown tremendously and we’re still working. We have a golf tournament every year. This year for the first time we had a fund raising tennis tournament. We’re supporting undergraduates to become teachers and the tennis tournament will support a graduate student in migrant education, who comes from a migrant family and who wants to be a leader in migrant education.