Why are We Denying Welfare Moms an Education?
Diana Spatz was a San Francisco welfare mom working as a housecleaner when, in 1987, she enrolled in a community college program to learn basic word processing skills. Her modest hope was to increase her earning potential from $7 an hour to $15 an hour, so as to better provide for her 10-month old daughter, Eden.
A few weeks after her classes began, Spatz was shocked when her caseworker cut off her welfare benefits and stopped returning her panicked phone calls. What happened? As Spatz recounted in a 1997 Nation magazine essay, her student financial aid was counted as income, and thus made her ineligible for the payments she relied on to meet her daughter’s needs.
Twenty-four years later--and 15 years after the passage of welfare reform (TANF)--far too little has changed. As anew report from Legal Momentum makes clear, it remains extremely difficult for mothers on welfare to access
