opinion
Bills, Hunger: realities of the working Poor
W
ould you recognize a
poor child when you
saw one? Nine-year-old
Carolyn Latimore and her sister
Aalijah, eight, are beautiful little
girls with big smiles on their
faces. But Carolyn, Aalijah, and
their older brother, Robert, 17, of
Middletown, Ohio, fell into pover-
ty when their parents divorced.
They’ve lived in four places in the
past four years including a chaotic
housing project where their bikes
and toys were stolen. Their moth-
er, Christine Allen, works nights
and goes to a junior college but
escaping poverty is mighty hard in
a recession.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
Julia Cass, on assignment for the
Children’s Defense Fund, met
Christine and her family earlier
this year. Three-quarters of poor
children have a working parent.
Christine began her adult life at a
disadvantage: no high school
diploma. She got married and
worked. For ten years, she was a
nursing assistant, earning $10 to
$15 an hour. “I was doing person-
al care for the elderly and I
worked in a lot of Alzheimer’s
units,” she said. Her husband was
“making pretty good money” with
overtime as a cook in a Bob Evans
restaurant. “We had a little house.
c hild w aTch
Marian Wright
Edelman
We didn’t have to worry about
bills being paid and food in the
refrigerator.” But things changed
after their divorce.
Christine’s experiences over the
past four years are typical of some
of the realities of the working
poor. One is the nature of the work
itself—frequently
physically
demanding, sometimes unpleas-
ant, often not fulfilling, and
always poorly paid. Bathing and
changing elderly people day after
day, year after year, she said,
“takes its toll”—but after that job,
she found herself stuck in a series
of other jobs that paid even less: at
a gas station, bowling alley, fast
food restaurant. It took her a
month, she said, to save $100 for
the deposit on an apartment in a
housing project and two more
years to get out of subsidized
housing and into her current
house—a well-kept place in a
somewhat rundown neighbor-
hood. At one low point she slipped
on ice, broke her wrist, and lost
her job at a nursing home. As a
consequence she lost the car she
was still paying on. When her
wrist healed she rode a bicycle
uphill across town to a part-time
job at a Burger King. Christine
decided at that point she had to go
back to school in hopes of doing
better for her children.
Christine completed her GED
which could lead to a better one:
she’s down to her last semester of
classes but the courses she needs
run until five o’clock and she
starts work at 2:30. She said the
school told her she could do the
courses online “but I don’t have a
computer, and I can’t afford the
Internet. That’s another bill!”
On the morning Julia Cass met
them, the girls were up at 7:30,
getting dressed and collecting
their school supplies. Their broth-
er had already left. None of them
‘There’s no milk in the refrigerator right
now. It’s horrible to say that. No milk for
cereal.’
and got a Pell Grant and student
loan to study administrative med-
ical assisting at the local junior
college. Through a temporary
agency she got a job at a nearby
factory where she earns $8.15 an
hour. Although her hours have
been irregular, they made it possi-
ble for her to go to classes in the
morning. But now the irregular
job she can’t afford to give up is
getting in the way of the education
ate breakfast. “There’s no milk in
the refrigerator right now,”
Christine said. “It’s horrible to say
that. No milk for cereal. But they
get breakfast and lunch at school
so I don’t have to worry about
them being hungry.” “Sometimes
we have granola bars, and every
day we have chocolate milk and
orange juice,” Aalijah said.
“Sometimes we don’t get orange
juice; we get peaches. And some-
times we get those little boxes of
cereal.”
They aren’t the only family
struggling in Middletown, which
has steadily lost factories and pop-
ulation.
Through
a
U.S.
Department of Agriculture pro-
gram, Family Services of
Middletown distributed 26,500
lunches in parks this summer so
Middletown children wouldn’t go
hungry while school was out.
Millions of children are not so
lucky in the summer. While almost
32 million children have lunch
provided to them during the
school year, only 2.3 million chil-
dren benefit from summer feeding
programs. Federal summer feed-
ing programs have been plagued
by state bureaucracy and need to
be simplified right now. Not only
can child hunger during long sum-
mer months be staunched, high
quality summer learning programs
can staunch summer learning loss
which widens the achievement
gap between poor and nonpoor
children. Our nation needs to
attend to the summer feeding
needs of children because hunger
does not stop when school is out.
Read the rest online at
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rich republicans are Out of Touch with america
I
f you needed evidence that
Republicans are out of touch
with America, look no further
than recent exchanges among can-
didates. Mitt Romney bet Rick
Perry ten thousand dollars over
something in his book. I under-
stand that Mr. Romney is dis-
turbed that Mr. Perry has taken
some of his work out of context,
but a ten thousand dollar bet!
Give me a break. With the aver-
age American household surviv-
ing on about $50,000 a year, that
ten grand represents nearly three
months living expenses for the
average family. Could Romney
have figured out a way to make his
point with Perry without thumbing
his nose at the rest of us?
On a roll, Romney also took on
now-frontrunner Newt Gingrich
for making more than a million
dollars in a contract with Freddie
Mac. He thinks Newt ought to
return the money. I want to know
what Newt was doing for the
mortgage company that made him
worth $1.6 million. And it just
goes to show how differently
Newt lives than the rest of us do.
Of course, that point was made
when he dropped a cool half mil-
lion dollars at Tiffany’s.
There is a yawning gulf between
the economic status of these
Presidential candidates and the
rest of us. Even the Obamas were
still paying off student loans when
elected in 2008! No wonder these
folks don’t want to tax the wealthy
– they are the wealthy.
The Tea Party populists talk
about the “little people”, but not
many little people make ten thou-
sand dollar bets or earn millions of
dollars consulting for mortgage
companies. It’s enough to make
you chuckle in dismay at how out
of touch these people are.
Meanwhile, although the unem-
b enneTT
c olleGe
Julianne
Malveaux
ployment rate has dropped, there
are still more than 14 million peo-
ple officially out of work. Out of
touch Republicans who refuse to
pass legislation to put people back
to work. The concerns of such
ordinary working people are a
concern that certainly Mr.
Romney has never had to experi-
ence. No wonder he can run
around making five-figure bets.
Whenever the wealth of some
Republicans is raised, others talk
about “class warfare” and suggest
that economic envy is at the root
of talk of taxing the wealthy
more. But folks like Bill Gates,
Sr. say the wealthy should be
taxed more, not less. Romney and
Gingrich are using their wealth to
finance their campaigns, and so I
guess they need every nickel they
can scrounge together.
Maybe this seems a little mean-
spirited, but the audacity of a
wealthy candidate to make a five
figure bet has just flabbergasted
me! It reminds me of Marie
Antoinette, who probably never
said, “let them eat cake”, but was
beheaded for her free spending
ways. I’m not suggesting behead-
ing as punishment for Romney or
Gingrich, but the French
Revolution raises interesting par-
allels to the present time. The
Occupy movement speaks to the
deep economic frustration that so
many people are experiencing, but
there are probably more people
who went shopping the day after
Thanksgiving than occupied any-
thing, even for a minute.
That’s why Romney’s bizarre
behavior won’t even raise eye-
brows in some circles. Romney
may be out of touch with America,
but sometimes I think that we, too,
are out of touch for electing peo-
ple who have essentially told all of
Americans who can’t afford bread
that they, too, can eat cake.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is
President of Bennett College for
women.
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december 14, 2011 The Seattle Skanner page 5