Policy failures etched in lives of moms, kids
Nancy Kaffer,
Detroit Free Press Columnist 10:16 p.m. EDT May 7, 2016
635981547397727966-20001208-Single-moms.jpg
On Mother's Day, policy is driving hardships for mothers across the
state.(Photo: Don Coker, KRT)
Chia Morgan is raising her 3-year-old daughter in Flint, where the water still
isn't safe to drink. In October 2015, the state acknowledged that the city's
water supply was contaminated by lead, exposing thousands of Flint kids to a
neurotoxin that causes behavioral and developmental problems.
Seven months later, Morgan is still hauling about 14 cases of bottled water
into her home every week. And she's afraid that her bright daughter, a girl
who's always exceeded developmental milestones, will fall behind.
Jolene Hernandez is, in practical terms, a single mother of four. Single,
because her husband, Julio, is in his native Mexico, unable to re-enter the
country
because he initially came here illegally. Hernandez will spend this Mother's
Day with their four children, absent their father, as she has for the last
eight years. But she's thought about what it would be like, if Julio were here:
"He would probably buy me flowers, let me relax the whole day. He'd make
dinner, maybe barbecue. And we would be a whole family."
T.C., the mother of four young children, is a Detroit Public Schools teacher.
The district has assured T.C. and other DPS teachers that they'll get paychecks
this summer -- if the state Legislature makes good on a plan to reform Detroit
schools, including a substantial cash infusion. But on Tuesday, T.C. wasn't
so sure. So she joined hundreds of DPS teachers who took part in a sick-out
last week that all but shut the district down, protesting the threat of payless
paydays in front of DPS headquarters on Grand Boulevard with her 4-year-old son
in tow.
It can be hard to connect distant debates in Lansing or Washington -- about
drinking water regulations, immigration reform or education legislation -- to
our lives. Policy can seem abstract.
But these three mothers are living the consequences of policy failures at the
local, state and federal levels.
The essential function of government is to ensure the safety of the governed,
to provide the framework that keeps our water safe to drink, our roads sturdy,
our schools operational and our families together. For each of these women,
government has failed.
But it didn't have to.
Who will fix the water?
Chia Morgan knew something was wrong with Flint's water almost immediately
after the city switched its supply in 2014, abandoning its decades-long contract
with the Detroit water system to draw water from the Flint River while a new
regional system was under construction.
After the switch, the water didn't look right. It smelled bad, and tasted
funny. That wasn't the lead, of course. Residents' early complaints started when
the water treatment plant added too much disinfectant, after the water was
contaminated with coliform bacteria, creating a chemical by-product that caused
the water's foul smell and strange look and taste. No one knew, back in 2014,
that lead was leaching into the water -- drawn out of lead service pipes,
buried far underground, by corrosive river water that hadn't been properly
treated.
That early alarm caused by the disinfectant triggered early alarms for
residents like Morgan.
Back in 2014, she said, "We were drinking it a little bit, but we mostly
switched over to bottled. We didn’t realize it was a crisis, we just didn’t like
how it looked and tasted."
Back then, Morgan's daughter still took bottles, her formula mixed with bottled
water. But, she said, the girl would go to the tap for a quick drink. She'd
play in a backyard kiddie pool. And after Morgan stopped using tap water
entirely, her daughter's bath times became short and hurried. She'd ask why she
couldn't play in the tub, Morgan said, or whether she'll be able to play in her
pool this summer.
"We don't have answers to the questions she's asking," Morgan said.
Water is available for free at the local firehouse, she said, but because
supplies are limited per person, "it's easier to go and purchase it yourself."
A Sunday dinner, she said -- macaroni and cheese, steamed broccoli and a whole
chicken -- took seven one-liter bottles.
"And that’s just to cook," she said.
She's told her daughter that the water will make her sick, that she'd have to
go to the hospital like when she had her tonsils out.
It's hard for a 3-year-old to understand.
"She asked the other day if the water was fixed, and asked, 'Who’s going to fix
it, the police?'" she said. "She says, 'Mom, one day they’ll fix the water,
and then we’ll say yay.' "
But no one is sure when that day will come. The protective coating inside the
pipes, meant to keep the lead from entering the water, isn't coming back as
quickly as initial predictions had suggested. As for Morgan, she says she won't
trust the water until every pipe in Flint has been replaced.
Years waiting for an answer
Jolene Hernandez met Julio in 2003, on a blind date. That first date, he was so
quiet that she thought maybe he couldn't speak English. It turned out he
was just shy. When Jolene and Julio were alone, he opened up. They talked, and
they fell in love. They married later that year.
Julio was always honest with Jolene; she knew he'd come here illegally, in
search of a better life. Visiting the small village he hails from, in the
Mexican
province of Durango, is like time travel to the 1850s, Jolene said.
The couple first filed paperwork to normalize Julio's immigration status in
2005.
"I was naïve," Hernandez said. "I assumed it was like in that movie, 'Green
Card' " -- a 1990 film staring Andie McDowell and Gerard Depardieu -- "we'd
get married, we file the papers, and everything would be fine. I had no idea it
would be 13 years later."
In 2008, Julio's mother was dying of kidney failure in Durango. Knowing it was
a risk, he made the trip anyway, and learned that he couldn't return.
The couple's youngest son was just 3 months old.
Since then, Hernandez said, she's continued to wrangle with our byzantine
immigration system, often following contradictory instructions, and getting
nowhere.
Because he'd arrived here illegally, he was barred from re-entry for 10 years.
Hernandez obtained a waiver that should have narrowed the time frame. It
hasn't.
Last week alone, Hernandez said, she's gotten two letters that seem at odds
with each other. One, from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement,
requires additional proof that her divorce from her first husband (who has
since died) was final when she and Julio married. Hernandez says she'll send
her divorce papers, even though she's already submitted them. The second
letter, from the American consulate in El Paso, acknowledged receipt of the
waiver
and asked her to submit yet another form.
One attorney, Hernandez said, told her he'd be surprised if Julio returns
before 2020.
"I've gotten my hopes up so many times, I’m afraid to get them up because it
hurts so much when they come crashing down," Hernandez said.
It's easy to say that what happened to Julio is just. That he broke the law,
and is paying the consequences. But immigration policy has to reflect the
complicated
reality of people's lives. And the reality is that Julio Hernandez married and
fathered children -- kids who don't know when, or if, they'll see their
father again.
What Jolene Hernandez wants is clear instructions about how to navigate this
morass, a set of steps to follow that make sense. Send in these forms, follow
up with this information, pay this fee. Or, failing that, an answer -- pretty
much any answer, she says, would be better than this interminable process
of constantly collapsing hopes.
"It’d be better if they said, 'Hey, it's never going to happen, have a nice
life,' " Hernandez said. "Or if immigration said, 'Hey, come back to us in
2020.'
Instead they say send us this, send us that, but nothing ever happens."
'We all make sacrifices'
Teachers like T.C. -- who didn't want to give her name because she fears
reprisal for participating in the sick-out -- are paid for 10 months of work.
About two-thirds of DPS teachers elect to have that pay spread across the
calendar year, meaning they'll receive checks in July and August for work
completed
during the school year.
Last weekend, DPS emergency manager and former U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven
Rhodes said the district couldn't guarantee summer pay, wages teachers are owed
for work they've already done. He's changed his tune since, promising teachers
will get checks this summer -- what he should have said all along.
But Rhodes' weekend uncertainty was the latest indignity heaped on a district
that's suffered plenty. Sick-outs earlier in the school year closed about
two-thirds of Detroit's public schools, but last week's sick-outs shuttered
nearly all of them.
T.C., a 15-year DPS veteran now teaching fourth grade, says she's not
insensitive to the hardship teacher sick-outs caused. She understands what it
means
for working parents to scramble for child care when school is closed with
little notice.
But now, she says, "I'm worried about being able to take care of my own family."
As T.C. and other teachers marched, some state lawmakers heaped copious blame
their way. Republican House Speaker Kevin Cotter called the sick-out teachers
"egotistical" and "selfish." Other officials have said teachers who
participated should be punished. Folks of a certain ideological bent want to
blame
teachers for the district's decades of woes, a petty kind of finger-pointing
that ignores decades of falling enrollment and declining revenue. Even Rhodes,
whose ill-advised comments surely encouraged the sick-out, issued a stern
letter chastising teachers who participated.
"I try not to take it personally, because I know how hard I work," she said.
"But it kind of is a slap in the face."
The day T.C. and other DPS teachers returned to the classroom, House
Republicans passed a DPS reform plan that offers little promise: Unlike the
Senate
version, the House bills fall at least $200 million short of the funding Rhodes
and Gov. Rick Snyder say is necessary to create a new district, one that
can educate kids without DPS's crippling debt.
Teaching isn't a 9-to-5 job, T.C. says. Her own children go to latchkey so she
can finish the work day. She spends her own wages on school supplies, and
puts in extra hours grading papers and preparing lesson plans.
"No one goes into teaching for the money," T.C. says. "I already sacrifice for
my students. We all make sacrifices for our students. But the line has to
be drawn somewhere."
And on Tuesday, she couldn't stop thinking about her students.
"I have a great class. I hate it that a great year is ending like this."
But we can fix it
Here's the thing: T.C.'s students don't have to end the school year this way.
Legislators could re-visit that DPS legislation this week, adding the dollars
Rhodes and Snyder say are necessary to put Detroit's schools on solid financial
ground. Those kids could finish fourth grade knowing that their state
legislators
-- their fellow Michiganders -- believe they have value. That their education
is important.
The U.S. Congress could create a more streamlined, commonsense system for
immigration -- and yes, that includes providing a path to citizenship for folks
like Julio Hernandez.
And we could get serious about fixing Flint's water -- about making upgrades to
water systems across the state and country -- and about providing the aid
Flint kids need to mitigate the impacts of lead.
When your water is safe to drink, your school district is well-funded, and your
family is together, it can be easy to forget that policy is not abstract.
Or that when it fails, there are direct, measurable consequences.
On people like Jolene. Like T.C. Like Chia.
Source:
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2016/05/07/immigration-dps-flint/83936550/
