Nearly $50,000 to get by

08:11 AM EDT on Monday, June 21, 2004

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

Journal photo / Connie Grosch April Brophy, 35, with her two youngest children, Melinda, 15, left, and Robert, 8, found herself struggling after a divorce, when her household income shrunk to $14,000 from about $35,000.

It takes about $50,000 for a Rhode Island family of four to scrape by with the bare necessities.

No Friday night dinner at Chuck E Cheese's. No trips to Walt Disney World, or karate lessons after school. Just rent, food, utilities, bills.

And they are the fortunate ones.

Roughly half of all families in Rhode Island -- 47 percent -- earn less than $50,000 a year, according to a study being released this morning by the Poverty Institute, a policy and advocacy group at Rhode Island College.

"It's half the state's families who struggle to make ends meet," said Nancy Gewirtz, director of the institute. "We are talking here about a bare-bones budget, and it affects people who think of themselves as middle class."

Thousands of families in Rhode Island depend on the state to help them cover heath and child-care expenses. Without such help, these families would have to choose between food and rent, medicine or heat.

"We want to demonstrate how much it costs to live in Rhode Island," Gewirtz said. "We really want to help policymakers understand who Rhode Island families are."

APRIL BROPHY could tell them.

A divorced mother of three children, Brophy, 35, never thought she would go on welfare. Three years ago, she and her husband, Ronald Brophy, a former truck driver, were able to make the mortgage payments each month on their home in Providence's Mount Pleasant neighborhood. They each owned a car. They even had a modest savings account.

They had married young, after Brophy became pregnant at 17 and dropped out of high school. Money was tight, but they both worked. Brophy, a trim, youthful woman who stands a shade under 5 feet tall, has waited tables, trained lunch clerks for Marriott Food Services, driven for Meals on Wheels, helped needy families get heat at the Blackstone Valley Community Action Program, and been a teacher's assistant in Providence public schools.

Then they divorced, and Brophy saw her household income shrink from about $35,000 a year to $14,000 -- the amount she made working 30 hours a week as a medical assistant for $9 per hour.

Brophy's ex-husband became disabled shortly before they split. For the first year, Brophy received $18 a month in child support -- $6 per child.

"I was crying when I went in there," Brophy said of her visit to the Department of Human Services. "I had no self-respect. No self-worth. And I was still working at that point."

A social worker told Brophy she was eligible for free childcare and health care. Her income was low enough to receive a few hundred dollars a month in food stamps, plus $554 a month in cash assistance.

The help was hard for Brophy to accept.

"It was so humiliating," she recalled, sitting in her beige kitchen, which is decorated with a border of colorful fruit and vegetables. "I'd wait before no one I knew was around in the supermarket before I'd check out."

Even with state assistance, money was scarce. She kept her daughter, Melinda, now 15, home from school when there were field trips, because she couldn't give her $5 for lunch. Brophy bought a hair clipper and started cutting the hair of her two sons, Ronald, now 18, and Bobby, now 8, because there was no money to send them to the barber. One day, she ran out of toilet paper and couldn't afford to buy more.

"I was so embarrassed," she said. One of her sisters "saved me that day," she says, going to Wal-Mart and dropping some off at Brophy's house.

Journal photo / Connie Grosch Robert Brophy plays on his new Slip "N Slide at his home in Providence. His mother now earns the most she ever has - $11 an hour.

A NET CAUGHT Brophy at one of the worst times of her life. Ironically, the fact that she earned so little helped her. If Brophy had earned more than $16.51 per hour, or slightly more than $34,000 a year, she would have lost her child-care subsidy and would have to pay a higher premium for the state's health care, RIte Care.

State subsidies, plus tax breaks offered by the federal government, can help struggling families stay afloat.

"They make a big difference," Gewirtz said. "The subsidies allow these mothers to go to work. But their wages are so low, people are working full-time and still cannot meet their basic needs. That's why the government needs to step in."

The study found that a single-parent family with two children needs to earn at least $44,000 a year to get by in Rhode Island, and a two-parent family with two children needs to earn $48,000. However, those estimates don't include the cost of items such as furniture, kitchen utensils or money for birthdays and holidays. They also underestimate the true cost of housing in Rhode Island, Gewirtz said.

Families earning less than those estimates often need help to cover health-care and child-care expenses, Gewirtz said.

Along with protecting the subsidies for struggling families, Gewirtz says the state should demand higher-paying jobs from companies that move to Rhode Island.

"The best way out of poverty is a good job," Gewirtz said. "A lot of times we give tax breaks to companies that promise to bring jobs, but they are often poverty-level jobs. There needs to be more accountability."

A single parent with two children needs to earn at least $11 per hour -- and get state help for childcare and health care -- to make ends meet, according to the Poverty Institute study.

But 7 of the 10 fastest-growing jobs in Rhode Island pay less than $10 per hour: retail sales, customer service, food preparation, nurse's aide, cashier, wait staff, and teacher's aide. Only nursing, computer support and teaching pay more, and they all require an associate's or bachelor's degree.

"We have to make sure the jobs we create in Rhode Island are jobs that pay enough to live on," Gewirtz said.

BROPHY'S BOSS wanted her to start working Saturdays. But Brophy had no one to care for her youngest child, Bobby, then in kindergarten. When the situation could not be resolved, Brophy quit, and entered an eight-month case-management program at Rhode Island College.

"It ignited my passion for social justice," Brophy said.

There Brophy learned that as kind as her social worker had been, she had neglected to tell Brophy that there were dozens of training and education programs open to her, part of her welfare benefits. The social worker had mentioned only two: RIC's case-management program and a certified nursing-assistant program.

The hardest part was returning to the classroom, Brophy said. She had earned her GED and taken some classes at the Community College of Rhode Island. But it had been years since she wrote a paper or studied for exams. Brophy received her certificate in case management in May 2003 and tried to get a job in the field.

"I wanted to give people the information they need to thrive," she said. "Once I figured out all of my rights that I wasn't aware of, I wanted to make sure other people who were at a crisis point in their lives got all the information."

Brophy had an internship at Travelers Aid, working one-on-one with homeless people.

"I came home every night and thanked God for what I have," she said.

But she couldn't find a full-time job in social work. Desperate, she began working at a CVS drugstore as a pharmacy technician.

A few months later, she landed her current job: organizing for Rhode Island Parents for Progress, an advocacy group for low-income working families.

"I love my job," Brophy said. "It's not like going to work every day."

She says she has regained her sense of self-confidence. She hopes to go back to school to earn an associate's or bachelor's degree in social work. She now earns $11 an hour -- the highest salary she has ever received.

Brophy was excited the day she got that first paycheck, and she waited to cash it.

"I held onto it for a day," she said. "I couldn't stop looking at it."

Things are better now. But Brophy still relies on subsidized childcare and health care to get by. She worries that the premiums she now pays for both will continue to rise, capsizing her budget just as she struggles to balance it.

Brophy doesn't want to go back to the days when she had to come up with last-minute excuses for why her children couldn't go to the movies with their friends. "You can't. We're going to Nana's house for a visit," she would say when she couldn't stand to hear herself tell them one more time that there was no money.

For more information, visit: www.povertyinstitute.org