A $100,000 renovation of the Ruskin Infant Child Development Center is nearly complete.
By SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published October 10, 2003
After more than two decades in cramped quarters, the staff of Ruskin Infant Child Development Center is finally getting room to stretch out - and serve more infants.
A $100,000 renovation scheduled to wrap up at the end of this month will make room for eight additional cribs. Expanded classrooms, a larger kitchen and glass-enclosed offices also will help the center better serve the six dozen charges it will be able to accommodate.
When the babies and toddlers move back into the infant care facility, a former amphitheater dressing room at 209 14th Ave. SE, it will mark the first time the entire one-story building is dedicated to the care of farmworkers' children.
Until now the center's operator, Redlands Christian Migrant Association, used only two-thirds of the building, which sits behind the health department's Joyce Ely clinic.
"You could hardly fit a desk in the office," said RCMA volunteer coordinator Sister Maureen Smith, who discovered the building in the mid '70s, soon after she arrived in southern Hillsborough to work with the migrant population.
The infant center currently serves 65 children from six weeks to 5 years old. It's one of four in Ruskin operated by RCMA, a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization that depends on local, state and federal dollars and donations.
The center, which opened some 25 years ago, was the first in the area dedicated to the care of farmworkers' children.
"Little migrant children were getting killed and poisoned and burned out in the fields, because there was nowhere for them to go," Sister Smith said.
The RCMA centers have become so vital, dozens of families are on waiting lists.
The renovations come with financial help from Hillsborough County; foundations, including the Community Foundation of Sun City Center; and donations from local residents and community groups.
Workers started the improvements in July, when the center relocated to space in Grove Pointe, a farmworker housing community where RCMA runs an education center for 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds during the fall, winter and spring.
Smith visited the children there last week during nap time, tiptoeing in between little cots where toddlers curled up under blankets.
"Look at this," she marveled. "Now isn't this more peaceful than being in the tomato field?"
