Valley College Project Helps Single Parents Survive Grind

When 37-year-old Terry Innuso realized in 1984 that she couldn’t support her three children single-handedly on the salary she received from “a long string of odd jobs,” she made the decision to bite the bullet and return to school.

But Innuso, like many college students who are also single parents, said she didn’t fully understand how hard the bullet was going to be.

“It was hell,” the Panorama City resident said flatly of her first semester at Los Angeles Valley College. She said she often had to leave her 2-year-old twins and 9-year-old son with unreliable baby sitters, strained family members or reluctant friends while she attended classes and worked part time.

Even after the campus child-care center was able to enroll her children in its program several months later, life didn’t get much easier. Waking up at 3 a.m. to study, working, scraping by financially, trying to meet the demands of her children’s “very strong personalities” and battling depression and exhaustion, she said, all became familiar.

“Sometimes all you can do is call someone else who’s going through the same thing and cry,” said Innuso, who will graduate this semester with an associate of arts degree in history. “The goal sometimes seems so far away, and you feel as though you’ll never get through it.”

Juggling Responsibilities

Innuso isn’t alone. Susan Carleo, director of Center for Advancement of Business, Labor and Education at Los Angeles Valley College, which recently obtained a $50,000 federal grant to assist single-parent students, painted a picture of many women who were juggling child care, jobs and college courses.

“It may sound obvious, but one of the most vital things that working single-parent students can have is assistance,” Carleo said. “They need information and support. But most of all they need to know there is a way to get through it in one piece.”

No specific statistics are kept on the numbers of single-parent, working students attending community colleges today. But Carleo said that, when she applied for the federal Vocational Education Act grant, she pointed out the number of working women with children, the high incidence of divorce and the increasing number of women returning to college to upgrade their skills. She said that, from her observations, 95% of the single-parent students are women.

More Programs Offered

Assisting single-parent students is now a goal for many colleges. All nine Los Angeles community colleges, for example, now offer programs, ranging from child care and financial aid to psychological services.

Valley College, however, is one of only seven community or state colleges in California to offer evening child care for night students, according to Carleo. Of about 130 families the child-care center serves each year, half are single parents.

The Vocation Education Act grant has been used to develop a lecture series and handbook specifically targeted to working, single-parent students, or single parents in the business community interested in returning to school.

Emotionally supportive and reassuring in its tone, the 22-page handbook identifies common feelings experienced by single-parent students. Among them are “fragmentation”--guilt when personal needs are placed before the childrens’--and frustration at such things as having to soothe a skinned knee when a term paper is due.

Written by Frances Hardy, professor of family and consumer studies at Valley College, the handbook offers help in time management, studying tips, diet and nutrition and where to go in the Valley for special needs. It is available free upon request to students and those who attend the lecture series.

Free, Open to Public

The lecture series, which is free and open to the public, will cover issues Carleo said she has identified as being “of foremost importance” for the single-parent population. Those issues include an overview of legal issues, a presentation on child-abuse issues, a money-management seminar and a discussion of facts and fallacies surrounding sexually transmitted diseases.

The first lecture last week, “What Your Divorce Lawyer Never Told You,” covered spousal support, child custody and visitation rights. Lecturer Mitchell Jacobs, a family law attorney with the firm of Abbitt & Bennett in Los Angeles, said the need for such information became obvious in his own practice.

“Often, I will represent a client and I’m the fourth or fifth lawyer the person has had,” he said. “Divorce is a stressful time, and clients don’t always ask the right questions. Some lawyers also don’t take the time.”

The many issues of concern to single parents, he said, include the right to change cities when joint custody is in effect, visitation rights when one parent has sole custody and the financial responsibilities of a parent who remarries.

“Child Abuse Issues: What A Parent Needs to Know,” scheduled for next Wednesday, will address child abuse both in and outside the home.

“Primarily, I will focus on general prevention so that children aren’t abused by others, as well as discuss the stresses and strains that occur with single parents that might lead that parent to abuse,” explained lecturer Timothy Kearney, a staff psychologist with the San Fernando Valley Child Guidance Clinic in Van Nuys. The clinic provides services to families with children under age 5, in which abuse has occurred or where there is a high risk of it occurring.

Sources of Abuse

Kearney said that research is mixed as to whether working single parents are more likely to abuse children than their married counterparts. Instead, he said, studies tend to point to other factors in abusive families, such as alcohol and drug abuse.

“There certainly are a lot of added stresses that could lead to abusive situations, or lead you to feel as though you wanted to abuse,” Kearney said. “On the other hand,” he added, “someone in a dysfunctional relationship also is under stress.”

“Money Matters and the Single Parent Family,” on April 22, will offer information “most peculiar to single parents,” according to lecturer Robert Bond, professor of finance, investments and real estate at Valley College.

Besides areas such as obtaining credit, estate planning and “collecting dollars as a result of the divorce,” Bond said, he will highlight investments that offer high liquidity and upside potential, “with a corresponding protection against downside risk.”

Tips on Finances

Bond said he recognizes that many single-parent students often do not possess the financial resources for long-term investments. As a result, the lecture also will cover such commonly confronted issues as whether to file income tax returns as “single” or “head of household” and other money-saving tips, he said. Financial aid officers will be on campus to advise students of federal and state resources. Bond will take questions from the audience.

The last lecture in the series, “Sex and the Single Adult,” will be offered April 29. Presented by Ginny Wiprud, professor of health science at Valley College, the discussion will seek to dispel common myths about sexually transmitted diseases.

“The public is getting overwhelming material” about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, Wiprud said, “and doesn’t know how to utilize it, or even what the facts really are.”

More Prone to Diseases

Wiprud said hospitals report an increasing number of newborns and mothers who test positive for opiates and sexually transmitted diseases. The people who are most prone to having the diseases, she said, “are people who are not married, and who have had many sex partners.”

Single-parent student Innuso, who plans to transfer to a four-year university and earn a teaching credential, joked that she wouldn’t need to attend the last seminar, “since the last thing I have time for is a social life.” Nevertheless, she said she considers the presentations to be of value to anyone thinking of stepping into her shoes.

“The more information you have about what you have to face and how you can get through it, the better,” Innuso said. “I don’t want to wash windows for the rest of my life, and I want my children to have higher goals than that. So, even though it’s hard, it’s worth it.”

Innuso paused for a moment.

“At least,” she said, “I hope it will be.”

Each two-hour lecture begins at 7 p.m. Space is limited, and reservations are required. Those interested in reservations or additional information should contact Susan Carleo at (818) 781-1200, Ext. 342.