Sunday, January 31, 1999
At-risk children's lives improve, by inches
Off welfare, yes; better off, maybe
BY MARK CURNUTTE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Nakia Colbert used to think her life would be like the life of her welfare mother.
“I would sit on the couch and wait for the mailman to bring the government check,” Nakia said.
She was 11 then. That was two years ago and before her mother, Jennifer Colbert, 31, completed the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority's Kaleidoscope job readiness program and went to work.
“I really want to go to college and be a judge and a lawyer,” Nakia said last week.
The welfare reform act of 1996 has caused the biggest changes in lives of at-risk children since The Enquirer started compiling the Tristate Child Index in 1995.
Four years is not a long enough time to clearly measure societal change, but some trends are beginning to emerge. The fifth annual index shows that, in most of 12 categories, Tristate children fare better than children nationwide.
Widespread improvements in juvenile crime, infant mortality and student proficiency are reflected here.
So is the dramatic increase in the number of children, like Nakia and her four siblings, no longer on welfare. Those numbers are clear. Much more difficult to determine is whether these children are better off now than they were.
More than 35,000 children in the eight-county Tristate area are among the almost 4 million nationwide who have been moved off welfare rolls since 1994, the index shows. The number of Tristate children receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) fell to 29,088 in 1998.
That's a 56 percent drop from 1994, when 65,401 Tristate children received the chief form of public assistance under the name Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). More than 95 percent of these families today are headed by single mothers.
While members of both major political parties declare welfare reform a success — and many point to positive changes in children's attitudes — child advocates warn of more mixed and troubling results for children in families in transition. Generally, children will only do as well as their parents, they say.
“What we do know is, in terms of poverty, kids are no better off now,” said Eileen Cooper Reed, executive director of the Children's Defense Fund's Greater Cincinnati Project. “Their families have simply gone from being non-working poor to working poor.”
“Welfare to What?,” a pamphlet jointly published in November by the Children's Defense Fund and National Coalition for the Homeless, reports that the proportion of three-person households nationally with weekly earnings below 75 percent of the poverty level increased from 6 percent in March 1990 to 14.5 in March 1998.
Still other advocates and some policymakers fear what will happen to the working poor and their children when the economy cools and unemployment rises. Former welfare recipients are generally the least skilled and will be the most vulnerable.
“Welfare reform would have been a total disaster if not for the economy,” said Patricia Eber, executive director of Hamilton County Family and Children First Council.
Most not as fortunate
Even in a healthy economy, it's clear that Ms. Colbert and her children are the exception in the welfare-to-work equation.
There's no denying that her children's lives and outlooks are better now because of reform-driven lifestyle changes she has made. But Ms. Colbert has received more help than is available to most former welfare mothers, advocates say.
In some ways, advocates say, she's a model for how welfare reform should work. She and her children are what can happen with enough of the right kind of help.
“If we weren't nice to Jennifer, she couldn't keep her job,” said Betti Hinton, director of Children's Protective Services and Ms. Colbert's employer. The private agency's program, Families First, has been in place at Hays Elementary for seven years and provides social skills classes, in-home parenting support and medical resources to families of school students.
Ms. Colbert is coordinator of the Families First parent center and teaches after-school social skills courses to fifth- and sixth-graders. On Jan. 21, she marked her first anniversary on the job. She had previously not held a steady job for more than a month or two.
“Jennifer wouldn't be able to keep the appointments she needs to make with her children at school if we didn't understand,” Mrs. Hinton said. “Many other employers fire these women on the spot.”
A flexible employer isn't the only thing Ms. Colbert and her children have on their side:
• She enrolled in a sweeping life skills training program that met daily for six months and she received child-care and other transitional support services before graduating last spring. Another program benefit is a mentor.
• Ms. Colbert has none of the major transportation problems most working poor families face. She has no car but can walk from her Lincoln Court apartment to her job at Hays Elementary in the West End. Most of the jobs for the urban poor are in the suburbs, well beyond the current reach of Tristate public transportation.
• Ms. Colbert's employer offers private health insurance. Most employers of the working poor do not. Her five children see doctors at Children's Hospital and get the prescription medicines they need. She is no longer on Medicaid, government health care for the poor. As a result, there is more room for other children in Medicaid expansion programs, which are treating increasing numbers of children in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
Kids mirror mom
As Ms. Colbert's life has improved, so have the lives of her children.
Mom has placed greater importance on education.
She pulled her youngest three children — daughter Venice, 11, Don, 10, and son O-Shay, 6 — out of Hays and enrolled them in Covedale Elementary, a magnet school in Price Hill.
Don likes his new school.
“It's harder now,” the boy said. “We have more homework. But it feels better now.”
Venice Colbert has had trouble in a couple of subjects. Last week, Ms. Colbert took the girl to the Sylvan Learning Center in Lincoln Court for testing. She wants her daughter to get a tutor.
“She didn't ask to be here,” Ms. Colbert said of Venice. “I brought her into this world and it's my responsibility to help her any way I can. I'm going to make sure she gets a tutor.
“A year ago? I probably would have blamed her for flunking.”
Nakia is a seventh-grader at another magnet school, Jacobs Center in Winton Place. Ms. Colbert wanted her there and not at Porter Middle School near Lincoln Court.
“At the schools in this neighborhood,” Ms. Colbert said, “they would worry too much about fitting in and not learning.”
From Jacobs, Nakia will take the admission test for Hughes Center, Cincinnati Public Schools' umbrella high school for a series of specialized academic programs.
“I want to graduate,” Nakia said. “I want to have my own car. I want to have my own apartment. It's OK to live down here (Lincoln Court), but there is a lot of shooting and drugs.”
There are now books in the family's apartment. The TV is on less than before. Their home is a cleaner place, too.
Leah Dennis, 48, of Avondale and a CMHA program manager, is Ms. Colbert's mentor. Ms. Dennis has seen behavior improvements in Ms. Colbert's children that go hand in hand with their mother's development.
“The children have gone from living in an environment with no control to one in which their mother now has the ability and strength to control,” Ms. Dennis said.
“A year ago, the children wanted what was around them. The fast money of the drug trade. They'd talk about fast sex. You can see a difference in how the children dress and what they're interested in. They can now talk to adults.”
Ms. Dennis gave the children a used computer as a Christmas present.
“Nakia called me up and said, "Miss D., thank you for the computer.'
“I said, "What are you doing?'
“She said, "We're doing our homework on it.'”
The children are developing an interest in religion, too. Ms. Dennis has taken them to her church, Metropolitan CME Church in Walnut Hills, and she recently took Ms. Colbert's children to see The Prince of Egypt, an animated film about Moses.
“There's no more movies that are preoccupied with sex,” said Ms. Dennis, who also has the family to her home every Sunday for dinner. “I'm just giving back what I received. It's a joy to see what is happening.”
But, said Ms. Dennis, a former psychiatric social worker, the help Ms. Colbert is receiving is “not normally there for welfare moms.”
Learning from the past
Ms. Colbert bottomed out in 1990. She clinged so tightly to hope that the father of all five of her children would marry her that she started free-basing cocaine and smoking marijuana with him.
“I did that for three years,” she said.
Until the morning she woke up and realized she didn't have enough money to buy a loaf of bread to feed her children.
“I stopped cold,” she said. “I must not have been addicted too strong. I quit. I said, "Jennifer, this isn't you. Have you gotten this bad?'”
It was an abusive relationship, she says, and Ms. Colbert didn't have the children to get additional welfare benefits. She wanted a family and was trying to please her man. If she was having kids to get more welfare money, she says, she wouldn't have had two abortions.
The father, who works in a chicken restaurant, pays $50 a month in court-ordered child support.
“I still want to get married, that's the ultimate,” Ms. Colbert said. “But I wouldn't marry him now.”
Their oldest child, a daughter who is 14, bore the brunt of her mother's ways. The child acted as the mother in the home and now, as her mother assumes that role, the two are engaged in a power struggle.
The daughter is now enrolled in Project Succeed Academy, a Cincinnati Public School in North Fairmount for children with behavior problems.
“I didn't realize how much the bad things in your life affect your kids,” Ms. Colbert said. “I learned in Kaleidoscope that you can't change what you've done in the past. I can change the future, and I'm trying to do everything I can to help her.”
One of those those things is sticking to a tight schedule and budget at home.
She works from 9 to 5. She gets home by 5:30 and starts cooking. They eat at 6:30. She checks homework at 7. “I'm tired, but I have to do it,” she said.
If the work is correct and completed, the children get an hour of TV beginning at 8. By 9, they're in bed.
“We had a schedule before, but we didn't stick to it,” she said.
Same with the family budget.
She makes $17,000 a year, which is $5,000 below the federal poverty level for a family of six, but her salary is more than the estimated $12,500 she received annually in food stamps and AFDC. She paid $115 a month for her CMHA apartment, for which she now pays $361.
She's part of another turnaround. From October 1997 through December 1998, household income earned by CMHA residents increased 46 percent, from $18.5 million to $27.1 million, and the number of gainfully employed residents increased 600, to 2,500. CMHA has 14,824 residents.
Ms. Colbert had been on welfare since leaving her mother's home at 18 in 1985, the year she graduated from Taft High School and was pregnant with her second child.
“I never learned the struggle of paying bills on time,” she said. “I knew I had my check every month. We had all the food we wanted. We shopped like there was no tomorrow. Now we're much more careful about what we buy.”
As she has learned the value of a dollar, she said, so have her children.
“It's kind of hard,” Ms. Colbert said. “It's hard on the kids when they want things we just can't afford.”
Nakia handles child-care responsibilities after school. She gets her three younger siblings a snack and makes sure they sit at the kitchen table to start their homework. They're not allowed to roam the streets or courtyards.
“I reward her for her work,” Ms. Colbert said of Nakia. “If I have them, I give her a couple of dollars before school. I let her go to the teen center (near their home). I'm trying to get away from material things as a reward. I'm trying to reward them with a lot of hugs and kisses and pats on the back.”
Ms. Colbert sits back at her kitchen table and smiles.
“Some of my friends say I'm too hard on my kids,” she said. “I say I'm not hard enough.”
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