Poverty rates shrinking for single moms

WASHINGTON — Single mother Evelyn Dortch earns a salary that barely puts her family above the poverty level, but she will gladly take that over the welfare checks she collected during the 1990s.

More than a decade after leaving her husband, Dortch got a college degree and a steady job to help support her and her four children. According to the 2000 Census, poverty rates for families led by single moms like Dortch decreased over the past decade.

Dortch says she is a "welfare success story," and experts point to the once-booming economy and greater acceptance in the workplace as some reasons for the improvement made by single moms.

Still, more than one-third of families led by single mothers live below the poverty level, census data show.

The 1996 welfare overhaul nudged more single moms off public assistance rolls and into jobs. But many women simply entered "working-poor" status, leaving them more vulnerable to the economic slowdown that occurred since the census was taken, said researcher William O'Hare of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a children's advocacy group.

Dortch's job at a community development outreach program pays her $22,000 a year. It is enough so that she doesn't have to go back on welfare, which she collected off-and-on between 1990 and 1999, when she graduated from college.

"Education was my ticket out of poverty and to gaining my self-respect," she said. Next year, she plans to move her family — her kids are ages 11 to 16 — out of public housing in St. Albans, W.Va.

"When (Congress) considers welfare reform, education needs to be the first priority, not employment," she said.

The census showed 34 percent of households led by a single mother with a child under 18 lived in poverty in 1999, an improvement from 42 percent in 1989. The Census Bureau asks about a person's economic status in the calendar year before forms are distributed.

For all families, poverty rates improved from 10 percent to 9 percent, while the rate for all residents improved from 13 percent to 12 percent, the census found.

"But the question is whether these lower rates are sustainable," said Jill Miller of the advocacy group Women Work!, which coordinates job training and education programs. "Our concern is that we see women who work two or three jobs who managed to get themselves out of poverty, but at a very high cost."