Child care center helps children who have children

By LOIS KINDLE | The Tampa Tribune
Published: January 6, 2011 Updated: 09:06 am

RUSKIN - Raising a child is tough for any parent, but it's especially hard when you're still a child yourself.

That's why Easter Seals and the Hillsborough County school district partnered to open a new child care center at the South County Career Center as part of the school's teen parenting program. Only three other high schools in the county have similar programs: Simmons Career Center in Plant City, and Gary Adult and D.W. Waters schools in Tampa.

"We take care of the children of teen parents who are attending classes here," said Donna Ackerson, the day care's director. "The idea is to help them further their educations and learn parenting skills at the same time."

Babies as young as 2 weeks to toddlers as old as 3 are cared for at the child care center, which provides pre-school training by Easter Seals employees. Each is certified in child development.

Their mothers attend all-day classes in academic subjects and consumer science (?), and get to visit their children during breaks. The teens also receive career training in fields like the military, manufacturing, nursing assistance, food preparation and first response.  FULL STORY
 
"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again". -Will and Ariel Durant

"Theoretically a society could be completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising crop of youngsters. "- SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS, 83RD CONGRESS, 1954 

"Cataclysmic changes in our elite culture, especially at our top-tier universities, have filtered down to our schools to cause the erosion of civic education that we have seen over the last three decades. We have not yet seen all the pernicious ripples caused by the great splash of multiculturalism, authoritarian utopianism, and cultural and moral relativism -- ideas that are antithetical to civic education, which historically has been national, realistic, and in some sense tragic in its acceptance of man’s imperfections, rather than therapeutic in its promise to ameliorate all human woes with enough money, education -- and coercion. These privileged concepts, spawned in our universities and spread by our elite media, our courts, and our politicians, finally have become the assumptions of our public schools, leaving us with the Balkan idea of a racial, cultural, and ideological mosaic rather than a confident American melting pot of shared values."  --Victor Davis Hanson