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.