The playground at the Krome Development Center in LaBelle is bursting with energy as a dozen or so four- and five-year old children embrace their play-time break gusto.
There are bongos and a xylophone at one end of the playground. There is a water station at the other — a place where children can play make-believe with an assortment of colorful plastic fish.
But most of the children zip around on three and four-wheeled bikes as their teacher calls out commands for them to stop and go.
"Red light. Green Light."
All told there one hundred or so children enrolled at this single development center.
“They love to run, ride bicycles and be free, I guess, is the word be free, ” said center director Theresa Salazar.
This center is just one of the many Florida campuses of the Redlands Christian Migrant Center.
Redlands was founded to address the urgent need for childcare among farmworker families. Now in its 60th year, it is Florida’s largest non-profit provider of early childhood education for low-income, rural families.
But, if one were to rewind the clock to 1964, this bustling playground -- this entire learning campus -- these children would not be here.
Instead the children would likely be in the tomato fields --exposed to pesticides, dangerous machinery, Florida’s relentless heat and other dangers.
Members of a Mennonite church were deeply troubled by this harsh reality, and so in 1965 they created the Redlands Christian Migrant Association to serve 75 children at two centers in Dade County.
Today Redlands is not just for children of migrant farmworkers. In addition to early childhood education, there are after school programs and charter schools serving some 4,300 children and families across 18 Florida counties.
"You want your children to do better, to have what you didn't have," Salazar said.
Enrollment in the programs is based on a family’s income.
"The neediest of the neediest are the ones we serve here," Salazar said.
Salazar is the daughter of migrant farmworkers from Mexico. She was just seven when she went to work in the fields.
"And we used to pick peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, everything, you know, oranges, grapefruits," she said. "I think I picked almost everything, man."
She started working with Redlands when she was in high school. And she became a migrant parent.
"I'm a migrant. My parents were migrant. I did migrant work, and for me as a migrant parent, I wanted my kids to do and have what I didn't have," she said.
All three of Salazar’s children attended programs at Redlands while Salazar worked the fields.
"Because it was more stable with somebody I trust I knew they were well taken care of when they were at school, while I was working, and that gave me relief to go and work," she said.
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