THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 16, 1995 TAG: 9502160022
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 133 lines
NOTHING SAID ``welfare mom'' to the other students when Kristen C. Starling, wearing blue jeans and carrying a red backpack, strolled into their classes at Tidewater Community College.
She was just another single parent, trying to get ahead. She agonized over tests with them, packed a typical student's sandwich for lunch and sometimes stayed up all night typing term papers. She even coached her son's soccer team.
But there was a side they didn't see:
Her getting up as early as 5 a.m. to get her three children off to school or a Social Services-provided day care. Slipping away before an evening class to transfer them to a second day care with later hours. Worrying about having enough gasoline in her $100 second-hand car to make it to the campus.
They didn't see her spending entire days in Social Services offices, filling out forms and answering questions to keep benefits checks and food stamps coming. Or standing in line with her children at public health clinics that accepted her Medicaid coverage.
And they missed her weekly phone calls to the Division of Child Support Enforcement, vainly seeking payments. Eventually, her two former husbands would amass arrears of $25,000 - the reason she turned to public assistance in the first place.
That wasn't the worst part for Starling. That came in the supermarket, where she endured the piercing, critical looks from other shoppers and cashiers when she paid with her stamps.
``A lot of times, when people give you dirty looks in the grocery store, you want to tell them: `It's because this man's not taking care of his children!' You want to give them an explanation,'' Starling said. ``But you look down. You don't want to look them in the face.''
So she used her welfare benefits to go back to school. She wanted to be able to face people again.
This face of welfare is one that children's and women's advocates are eager to change - single-parent families like Starling's forced onto the dole because absent parents aren't paying child support.
They're pushing for tougher child-support enforcement as part of the welfare-reform plans being debated in Washington and Richmond and other state houses around the nation.
If both parents are made to pay their fair share to support their children, the argument goes, fewer families will have to resort to welfare. They cite the $34 billion gap between what potentially is owed in child support and what actually is collected in this country - money that may have to be spent on welfare payments.
``When parents evade their responsibilities, children suffer . . . and the taxpayers often get left with the bill,'' Rep. Barbara B. Kennelly (D-Conn.) testified last week at a congressional hearing on welfare reform.
Starling, for example, collected $347 a month in Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the main welfare program for poor families, plus food stamps and Medicaid.
In Virginia, only about a quarter of the 73,000 families on AFDC last year collected even one payment of child support, said Michael R. Henry, director of the Division of Child Support Enforcement. Most - unlike Starling - didn't have court orders because paternity hadn't been established.
Even support payments lower than what they could get from AFDC could allow parents with child custody to work instead, even at low-paying jobs, Henry said. ``That child-support amount really can make a big difference,'' he said.
Starling certainly could've used it.
Married at 19, she began going on and off public assistance in 1982, when she separated from her first husband and was pregnant with their son, Andrew, now 12. Her parents let her move back into their Arrowhead home and helped out as much as they could.
They did the same in 1988 after Starling divorced her second husband in South Carolina on grounds of physical cruelty. She rarely received the $75 a week the judge said he owed her and their two daughters, Katie, now 8, and Rebecca, now 6.
Before her marital troubles, welfare to Starling meant ``downtown Norfolk bag people.'' It wasn't something her middle-class family thought about or discussed. Her father worked three jobs at times so her mother could stay home with her and her older brother.
But now Starling's kids needed the things kids need: clothes, school supplies, food.
``It was just a necessity,'' Starling said. ``I had to survive.
``They're kids. Every three months they need shoes. . . . There have been things at school they've had to miss out on because we didn't have the money - trips. . . . You go in a store and the kids are going: `Mommy, can we have it?' And you've got $2 in your pocket. . . . You get tired of having to say `no' all the time.''
Neither former husband responded to requests for interviews for this article.
Twice-divorced, on welfare and living with her parents, Starling felt like a failure. But she also felt a need to act, to help herself.
She pestered child-support workers weekly, even after one advised her to drop her case because her second husband ``wasn't ever going to pay.'' She called South Carolina herself for documents the workers overlooked. She talked a court deputy into serving contempt papers on her ex-husband when she found him in the courthouse on a different matter.
Three weeks after her youngest child was born in August 1988, Starling enrolled in TCC. Child Support Enforcement and the courts weren't getting her money, so she needed to support her children herself.
There were some false starts and a switch in majors, but she earned her associate's degree in computers in May 1991. When she couldn't find more than minimum-wage temporary work, it was back to school, this time in hairstyling. In October 1993, state license in hand, she went to work at a Chesapeake salon, fixing hair and doing office work.
She was earning her own way again. She was off welfare, this time she hoped for good.
``One time, after I got off assistance, I remember writing a check for groceries,'' said Starling, now 33. ``It felt good. . . . You felt liberated. You get some of your self-respect back.''
A year earlier, she had married Joseph L. Starling, whom she met in a single-parents organization. He understood her pain - he was supporting three children from previous relationships.
The Starlings - he works with a plumber - live in a neatly furnished, three-bedroom rented townhouse in Arrowhead. China plates line a dining room cabinet, and the air smells of potpourri. Welfare - and the days when Kristen Starling went for days without toothpaste or shampoo so she could buy shoes for her children - seems far away.
It shouldn't have been so hard, she said. Child-support orders should be strictly enforced. She doesn't understand why state leaders aren't more aggressive in seeking it, noting that her second husband owes Virginia more than $18,000 for welfare payments she received instead of child support.
``That's just one man,'' she said. ``That's a lot of money that taxpayers are paying out.'' ILLUSTRATION: MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff
Kristen Starling has not been helped by two ex-husbands. the
children are, from left, Rebecca Tabor, 6; Andrew Pelletier, 12; and
Katie Tabor, 8.
KEYWORDS: WELFARE by CNB