School renews season of hope

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 10, 2000

The restless night of the principal of Ruskin Elementary had turned into the first morning of the first day of the new school year in Hillsborough County.

The school uniform is white shirts and blue slacks, skirts or jumpers, but Mrs. Libroth's long linen dress was red. It was as if she'd wanted to trumpet the special nature of the day, this new beginning for the 700 children who filled the classrooms.

It was scarier for some than for others. Ruskin Elementary is one of those schools where the sign for the library reads libreria, as well as library, because so many kids, with names like Marisela, Luis, Adolfo, Estafani, come to school speaking just Spanish.

Life turns in peculiar directions.

This town 30 miles south of Tampa, on Tampa Bay's eastern shore, began as a stab in the dark against the world's inequity. Ruskin was named for a 19th-century British social critic, John Ruskin, who believed in that delightful delusion of man's improvability. Tampa Bay's Ruskin was founded not quite a hundred years ago as a little utopia, where everybody was supposed to get what he needed.

But any idea of equity was carried off long ago by the bay breeze. Ruskin became a farm town run on the backs of Mexican workers who get paid by the bucket.

It is Mary Libroth's life to cope with the fallout from this imbalance.

Some kids come to school from homes without a book in the house. Some don't know what to call a triangle or the color of the dress worn by the principal -- in Spanish, she is addressed as la directora.

But they can count. They understand money. Working in the fields, or hearing their relatives talk about it, has taught them.

Mary Libroth's face brightens as we go from class to class, as she stops to tell a lonely-looking, long-faced boy that she hopes he'll get his smile back. If he does not understand her, he must get something from her upbeat voice.

She has good reasons. Ruskin Elementary is one of those places you never hear enough about. Many migrant kids won't arrive until October, when the growing season starts here, and will leave in April, when it ends. Nevertheless, this school that the FCATs once stamped a D jumped to an A last year. There appears to have been no miracle. Just work.

"I run a very structured school," Mrs. Libroth said. "I don't allow a lot of outside play. I don't permit naps in kindergarten. You come to school, you come to school. Everything is a teaching moment."

It's so simple.

It's so hard.

Her students had such trouble Mrs. Libroth even had to throw out usual thoughts about the alphabet. Pictures of the letters, accompanied with words beginning with each, have been in classroooms since there were one-room school houses. But Mary Libroth's teachers figured out their kids got confused if the look of the alphabet differed from room to room. Were the letters in print or cursive? Was the sound of the letter l represented by lion or lollipop?

So they devised what the principal calls the Ruskin Alphabet, with the letters printed boldly, and the pictures that go with them the same in every room, for the kids to refer to as they struggle to make sounds, and sense.

Before the A grade came out last June, Mary Libroth thought of giving up, leaving Ruskin Elementary, retiring entirely. It would have been understandable. She is 63. But she has been revived. That FCAT result surely helped. But it's those kids, who come to school with so little. It's those kids, the first day of the year, and all the days thereafter.

"To see the way they light up, even for a sticker," she said. "They are so unspoiled."

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