As a child, Lalita Booth never minded being poor because she never knew the alternative. The home she was born in was foreclosed on and her parents lived like nomads — leaving town or even the state when eviction notices piled up or jobs were lost. Her current apartment is the 80th home in which she has lived.
She was emancipated from her parents at age 16, married at 17, and had her son, Kieren, at 18. Two years later the couple had a messy divorce, which left Booth — a housewife with no professional skills — poor once again, this time with a child.
When the little money she had ran out, she placed her belongings in storage, sent her son to live with her in-laws and began living in her run-down, white Subaru or crashing on friends’ sofas. She bounced from state to state, trying to save enough money to afford a home and get Kieren back, which took nearly a full year.
They moved to Sanford with a boyfriend in 2004, when she became a Winn-Dixie cashier. She relied heavily on her boyfriend financially and realized this put her in jeopardy again to lose everything.
She took control and enrolled in Seminole Community College. “I had the feeling of being dependent on a man again and I said I will not be in this situation,” she said. “One of my favorite quotes is: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’” Today, Booth, who remarried, will receive a double degree in finance and accounting next spring from the University of Central Florida and then plans to attend Harvard University Law School.
Her ultimate goal is to reform welfare policy to empower the impoverished so they can become self-sufficient as she did. “I want to fix the problem that kept me down,” she said. “It is so depressing to turn down a salary increase because you will lose child-care assistance and that $1 extra an hour is not going to make up for it.”
To help identify ways to chip away at the root of poverty, UCF sociologists James Wright and Jana Jasinski recently released the first comprehensive survey on “Poverty in Central Florida.” The study analyzed issues like housing, debt, racial and gender disparities, and health care within a range of income levels.
The study surveyed 1,500 people throughout Central Florida to find that half of the low-income sector (a person making less than $30,000) is working 35 to 40 hours a week, a majority is comprised of single females, and one in five is uninsured. Many of the working poor are stuck in debt (most of which comes from unpaid medical bills) with little or no financial savings account, and some reported being behind on their rent or mortgage.
“There’s this idea that poverty is voluntary, that if you really want to you can sober up, take a shower and get a job. But poverty is incredibly hard to escape,” Booth said. Wright said one of the first things that can be done locally is grabbing all available federal monies that in the past have recycled back into the system. For instance, $60 million in food stamps went unclaimed last year in Florida.
The survey revealed that only one in six low-income households were applying for food stamps; 10 percent were enrolled in the Women, Infants, and Children, a supplemental food and nutrition education program; and 60 percent of low-income children participated in the school’s free-lunch program. “This tells us more people should apply,” Wright said.
Greater awareness of the each county’s 2-1-1 system, which helps connect citizens to needed services, including rental assistance and supplemental food programs. Only one in 10 low-income families surveyed reported awareness of 2-1-1 and only one-third of those actually used it. “This study proves that poverty is poison and the antidote is effort and will.
There is clearly plenty of work to be done and many people willing to do it,” Wright said. If a kind of free, professional training would have been available, perhaps Booth never would have lived on the streets or had to hand her child off to family members. She said society should not focus on giving a free handout, but rather give impoverished people the skills and resources needed to obtain reachable goals.
Gary Earl, president of Workforce Central Florida, said they have switched their focus to training folks in entry-level jobs so they can realize upward mobility in the company. Over the last three years there has been improvement as more and more employers are training the working poor, but they need more government funding — which has dwindled in recent years — to really make an impact.
Donna Wyche, manager of Orange County Health and Family Services, added that there will always be the working poor, but there should be fewer than what exists today. “People think if they work hard enough they can realize the American dream, but we have to have these lowlevel jobs. There will never be a time when everyone is able to be brought up to the middle class,” she said.
Booth started from scratch in earning her education. Since her parents divorced when she was 8, Booth was juggled between her mother, father and her grandmother every six months, creating large gaps in her education. She completely skipped the fifth grade, something she is bitter about to this day because of her lack of understanding in geometry — a subject that appears on many standardized tests.
Today, Post-it notes with geometry equations dot her apartment wall, both to help her learn and to remind her of the past — something she would not change for the world. Booth, now 27, plans to study law and public policy at Harvard Law School so that she will one day be able to influence the way society manages its poor.
“Not everyone should have the same goals as me — to go from a homeless, single mother, high school dropout to someone pursuing Harvard. It is important to feed your family and survive the day-today, but you need more skills to better yourself, things that outlast the welfare check.”
