Red tomatoes. Green cucumbers. Brown potatoes.
At age 5, Terry Bonilla learned her colors not in a kindergarten classroom, but in the fields of Alabama. She matched the word for each hue to a crop she learned to pick.
“All my family has been migrant — my grandpa and my grandma, my mom and my dad, everybody,” she said.
Bonilla grew up in those fields. As other children her age learned multiplication and division, her mathematics lessons came in the form of counting how many berries she had loaded into a bucket.
But one thought kept playing through her mind: “What am I doing here?”
After 13 years in the fields, Bonilla got a job as a preschool teacher at Redland Christian Migrant Association. She has stayed with the organization ever since.
“It’s really easy to connect with those kinds of children because I’ve been there,” Bonilla said.
Bonilla has helped and encouraged hundreds of children throughout her 28 years at RCMA, but the organization has also provided opportunities for her to work toward the education she never was able to attain earlier in her life.
This spring, Bonilla and Ramona Matthews, who both work at RCMA centers in Plant City, were awarded some of the first scholarships through the Krome Educational Fund. Matthews will soon be finishing her bachelor’s degree, and Bonilla is about to start working on hers.
Terry’s Trek
When Bonilla started working at RCMA, she was just 18. By this time, her mother had become a director at one of the centers and encouraged her to become her co-worker.
Bonilla knew her job made a big impact on the children, and it was rewarding for her, but some of the loved ones in her life encouraged her to go back and get a high school diploma.
She started high school at age 21, and it was clear that she didn’t fit in.
“I dropped out because I couldn’t take it anymore,” Bonilla said.
But she didn’t give up. She earned her GED, and later, an associate’s degree in early childhood education.
Soon, motivated by her goal to become a center director like her mother, Bonilla will be taking her first classes as a bachelor’s degree candidate.
“Education’s very important,” Bonilla said. “And if you want to do something, just keep it up. It’s never too late.”
Ramona’s Route
Matthews always knew she wanted to be a teacher and help guide young minds. She was inspired by her mother, who raised eight children on her own.
“All of us, wherever we went, everybody had to go,” Matthews said. “My mom made us stick together.”
But she has come a long way since her first days in a childcare center.
“When I first started working with children, I was young. I was 19 years old. I really didn’t know anything about kids,” Matthews said.
Matthews soon joined the staff at RCMA’s center in Wauchula, which was a head-start program where the children all spoke English.
Over time, Matthews learned more and more about children’s developmental stages, cognitive processes and motor skills.
But when she transferred to a center in Plant City, she ran into a language barrier. She had taken only one Spanish class in high school, and that limited material wasn’t exactly fresh in her mind.
“Here, it was a challenge,” Matthews said. “But it didn’t bother me, because I was willing to learn.”
Through daily interactions with the children and their families, Matthews has picked up a lot of the language and is now able to communicate in Spanish at a basic level.
Matthews earned her associate’s degree with the help of an RCMA funding program. One of her supervisors encouraged her to take the next step and complete a bachelor’s degree.
Matthews started classes at Florida Polytechnic University in 2013, and then transferred to University of South Florida. She now has just three classes remaining
Matthews’ goal from here is to become certified as a teacher so that she can teach at one of RCMA’s charter schools.
“I’m just so happy to be at the finish line,” Matthews said. “I never stopped. I said, ‘I’m going to go until I get this degree.’”
