Crystal Terry is used to being the giving one in the family, but lately she’s had to ask aunts and uncles and other loved ones for help. It’s a bit of a knock to her pride, but sometimes you do what you have to do when children are involved.
The Wilmington mother’s twin 4-year-olds and 16-year-old high school kid need back-to-school basics: shoes, clothes, book bags, notebooks and so on.
Terry, who holds four degrees, was one of the 65,000 long-term unemployed who saw an end to extended federal unemployment benefits on June 30. So she’s patching together funds from where she can to make ends meet.
Terry’s situation underscores the difficulties facing families and children for the chronically unemployed.
With Terry’s unemployment, her children became among the one in 10 in North Carolina with a parent who is unemployed, according to a study called “Unemployment from a Child’s Perspective” by the Urban Institute and First Focus, national advocacy groups.
When that measure is expanded to include the underemployed – parents who had to settle for part-time work because of slack business conditions or difficulty finding full-time work – the number of children affected by their parents’ employment woes jumps to 17 percent – about one in every five children in the state.
“When parents lose their access to work and a stable income, families become much more likely to slip into poverty. They’re more likely to experience food insecurity and experience housing insecurity as a result,” said Laila Bell, director of research and data at Action for Children, a statewide data and child advocacy organization.
It’s getting tougher for the unemployed in North Carolina.
Also going into effect on July 1 was a North Carolina law that reduced maximum weekly payouts to $350 from $535 for individuals who are making new claims. For those people, it also shrank from 26 weeks to between 12 and 20 weeks, the maximum amount of time one can be on unemployment, depending on the unemployment rate. Right now, the state is still at 20 weeks.
Whittling debt
But conservative business groups say the change was necessary to grow the economy.
Josh Ellis, spokesperson for the Department of Commerce, said that when the law was passed, North Carolina had the third-highest unemployment debt in the nation, behind California and New York, at $2.6 billion. It is now expected the state can pay its debt by 2015, three years earlier than anticipated.
“By having this debt it triggered automatic increases in taxes that were creating a climate where it was hard for businesses to hire new employees and keep the ones they had,” he said.
Anytime the state has outstanding debt it adds an increase of $21 per employee per year of debt.
“You can see how this would snowball,” Ellis said.
Ellis added that this was not a decision made lightly.
“We recognize there are people throughout North Carolina struggling, and we feel for those people. But the best way we can help is to help them find jobs,” he said.
As for Terry, she said it’s been “very difficult – like the hardest time ever in life.”
“I’m used to making a substantial amount of money,” said Terry, who lost her medical specialist job about a year and a half ago.
She said, though, it has taught her children some valuable life lessons as they have slipped from the middle class.
“They’re hearing ‘no’ more, and that’s not a bad thing all the time,” she said.
Helping hands
Those who help people in need are also seeing the difficultly first hand.
Marie Dubel, a volunteer with Grace United Methodist Church, said she got hooked up with Nourish NC some four years ago. She was driving down Carolina Beach and saw children climbing out of a Dumpster during a search for food.
“They could tell me when the fast-food places along Carolina Beach road dumped their food,” she said. “This is how these kids are eating on the weekend. All receive free or subsidized lunch at school. We began with that.”
In four years, Dubel said she’s gone from providing food to five children to about 350 this school year. Food is prepared for the children for the weekends and holidays.
“I can tell you that when you just look at the time period involved, that’s the period of the recession and unemployment. So you could make a limited correlation (to growing unemployment),” she said.
Annie Anthony, director of the Cape Fear Volunteer Center, said there have been more parents interested in getting stuffed book bags the organization has made available for the start of school.
“The cost of school supplies has really jumped. All of our kids are free lunch, so all of those people are underemployed or unemployed,” she said.
Anthony said her organization along with the local Fox affiliate offered a job fair last week that saw decent attendance. Most of the people there were unemployed, she said. One sought-after class, she said, was a one-on-one with an expert in resume and cover letter writing.
“That was really popular,” she said.
She said classes were also offered on things like how to dress and eat, including a hint about not salting your food before tasting it at a business dinner as that could be perceived as impetuous by a potential employer.
Metro desk: 343-2389
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