Fluent Essays

I attached doc for all the requiremtns please read carefully. This is my final and I dont want to fail it, iam looking for a good paper with NO PLAGRISM.IAM NOT SURE HOW MANY PAGES THE PROFESSOR DID NOT MENTION, ITS AS LONG AS YOU ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS TO THE TOPIC SO I HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY PAGES I NEED TO SELECT BUT I NEED IT DOUBLE SPACED. THANK YOU final_cd.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview I have included information about the experiences of 2 families at the end of the final. Please answer all questions for each family 1. (10 points) Please name the first family you selected: 1a) What changes in the American Family have influenced the current family situation of this family? 1b) What help do we provide, through our tax dollars (government programs), for this family? Include the name of the program and describe how the program supports this family. 1c) Describe the biggest challenge to this family to allow them to be selfsufficient? 1d) If this family were close friends, what suggestions would you have to help them become more self sufficient? 2. (10 points) Please name the second family you selected: 2a) What changes in the American Family have influenced the current family situation of this family? 2b) What help do we provide, through our tax dollars (government programs), for this family? Include the name of the program and describe how the program supports this family. 2c) Describe the biggest challenge to this family to allow them to be selfsufficient? 2d) If this family were close friends, what suggestions would you have to help them become more self sufficient? 3. Your Student Learning Outcome for this course was: Analyze the effects of ethnicity, class and social policy on the family. (10 points for each completed question) 1. How did you analyze the effects of ethnicity on the family? 2. How did you analyze the effects of class on the family? 3. How did you analyze the effects of social policy on the family? *Include assignments you completed for each and review how you performed for these assignments. FAMILY PROFILES FAMILY #1-HANEBUTH FAMILY: Daniel, 6, Ayden, 7, Aaron, 10, and Serenity, 5, live in a housing project in Middletown, Ohio. In the past two years, they’ve also stayed in a motel and a homeless shelter because their mother, Tiffany Hanebuth, lost her job and has not been able to find another job. The January jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor was good news for the 243,000 people who found jobs. And good news for the American economy as the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent, the lowest level in nearly three years. This is the 16th straight month of jobs growth, but the recovery can’t come soon enough for the millions of long-term unemployed like Tiffany Hanebuth from Middletown, Ohio. She says, “I just want a job, any kind of job.” As with other families barely afloat on minimum wage jobs, the Hanebuths never had steady smooth sailing, but they were self-supporting until two years ago when Tiffany was laid off as a carhop at a Sonic drive-in and could not find another job. “I remember before, you could just go anywhere and get an application and get hired that day. It’s not like that now,” she said. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Julia Cass recently met Tiffany Hanebuth on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund, and Cass says by anybody’s definition Tiffany is a survivor and a worker. Tiffany was raised by her father who she said was a biker and bar owner. “He started bringing friends home and it was too much for me,” Tiffany said. By the time she was 12 she left home to stay with friends and eventually found a job, got her own apartment, and finished high school. Tiffany didn’t meet her mother until she was 17. “My father told me she didn’t want to take care of me because she was a drug addict,” Tiffany said. “I wanted to find her and I did. She was a drug addict.” Despite the fact that her own childhood was so chaotic and cut short, Tiffany wants to provide a better life for her own children, Aaron, 10, Ayden, 7, Daniel, 6, and Serenity, 5. Aaron said he wants to go to college, get a job at NASA, live with his mom, and pay the bills for her. Tiffany has always been the breadwinner for her children although their father, who doesn’t live with them, helps out with child care and other occasional needs. She’s worked at gas stations, fast food restaurants, grocery stores, a Bob Evans restaurant, and various factories through temporary agencies before she lost her job two years ago. Tiffany managed on unemployment for almost a year but fell behind on her rent and the family was evicted. She lost $150 when a landlord kept her deposit and didn’t give her the apartment. “He said, ‘Take me to court if you want to.’ I think he knew I couldn’t afford to do that.” That’s when the family lived for a while in a motel and a homeless shelter. The shelter staff helped her get public housing at a sprawling complex named Freedom Court where Tiffany pays $180 a month rent. She also signed up for food stamps and in June 2010, for cash assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Anyone who thinks welfare recipients do nothing but sit around and cash their checks isn’t familiar with the schedules of Tiffany and many others like her. The welfare reform of the late 1990s put the emphasis on moving recipients from welfare to work and set a lifetime limit on federally-assisted cash payments for many families. Initially recipients are required to go to a job readiness site for a month to get training in resume writing and interview skills and use the computers and fax machines to apply for jobs. The big problem is that when there aren’t many jobs, the system doesn’t work as designed. So Tiffany was assigned to community service in exchange for receiving cash assistance (about $650 a month for her and the children). Her assignment was at the local Salvation Army where she put donated clothing on racks and did whatever else she was asked to do. After several months, she was hired there and went off cash assistance. “But I only worked there a month and a half before they had to let the new people go,” she said. When she reapplied for cash assistance she was told she would be sanctioned for not reporting to community service and could not receive assistance for three months because she was on record as not having signed in at the Salvation Army. But Tiffany said she didn’t sign in for community service because she had started to work there instead. She said she took her pay stubs to the welfare office but the sanction was not withdrawn. “The guy was actually rude. He said if I wanted to keep complaining, he’d take my food stamps and Medicaid too.” By that point Tiffany had sold her car and television and gotten behind on bills. She’s still in a hole. Tiffany got back on cash assistance after the three months passed. She now does 86 hours a month of community service at the food pantry of Family Services of Middletown and likes it there. The people are nice and she can sometimes take home extra produce. She usually takes the bus but at the end of the month she sometimes walks—a two-hour trip. The director gave her a bicycle, but it was stolen at the housing project. Recently she missed a day when Ayden was sick. “I’m a stress ball that I won’t be able to make up the hours and be sanctioned again,” she said. Tiffany’s children sometimes get backpacks of food at school on Fridays to take home for the weekend. Tina Osso, Executive Director of the area’s Shared Harvest Foodbank, said that 300 children in Middletown schools received the backpacks last school year. “They don’t go to all the children who receive free breakfasts and lunches, just to those identified as showing physical, behavioral, or academic problems associated with chronic hunger,” she said. But cuts in federal and school district funding have put this school year’s backpack program in jeopardy. Tiffany, who’s never been afraid of hard work, doesn’t want to have to rely on assistance and donated food forever. For now, the safety net is doing exactly what it is designed to do: programs with proven track records are keeping Tiffany and her family above water while she continues searching for a job. Proposals to dismantle many of these proven programs wouldn’t make unemployed parents’ job hunts any easier—but they would leave millions of poor children with less help and less hope. They need jobs! FAMILY #2-NAILOR FAMILY: Amanda, 4, and Emily, 3, play with toys their parents got on a bartering website called freecycle. Their father, John Nailor, owns a computer repair business in Evart, Michigan but makes less than $22,314 a year, the poverty level for a family of four. “If it weren’t for food stamps and the income tax credit, I don’t know where we’d be,” he said. “We would be lost.” The Nailors don’t fit the old image of a poor family. They live in a house with a yard in a small town in Middle America—the sort of place that might have been featured in a Norman Rockwell painting. They are the new face of poverty. Almost a quarter (23 percent) of children in Michigan live in poverty today, according to the 2010 Kids Count Data Book for the state. The rate is even higher—up to 35 percent—in rural counties in central Michigan like Osceola, where Evart is located. Day to day, this means that John and his wife Sarah are “on a budget so tight we are down to dimes and pennies” by the end of the month, he said. For food, they eat “just the basics except maybe one meal a month where I’ll cook something super special like shrimp,” she said. They have no cable television. “We can’t afford it! No way!” John said. They never go out to eat or take trips. The childrens’ toys are mostly second hand, and their clothes are hand-me-downs that John got through freecycle.org, an international website with local groupings that trade items for free. About 300 people in Osceola and three neighboring counties, undoubtedly struggling like the Nailors, are in their group, exchanging household items, furniture, toys, clothes and even foods like fresh eggs. If not for the Earned Income Tax Credit, he said, they wouldn’t have anything new at all. “Amanda and Emily are young so they don’t realize how poor we are,” Sarah said. “But when they get older…” She did not finish the sentence. The Nailors are deeply worried about the future because they don’t know what else to do. Anyplace but Evart would be more expensive because they live in a house owned by Sarah’s mother and don’t have to pay rent. Their computer repair business is struggling—and they started the business because John couldn’t get a decent job. “The business made just $1,900 over the past three months and summer’s usually the best time,” he said. “Now comes winter when it’s slower.” The Nailors retreated to Evart when Sarah got pregnant with Amanda and they’d both become frustrated with the job market in Grand Rapids, the largest city in the area. “Granted there were jobs there but so many people looking for them it was hard,” he said. John graduated from high school and went to a technical school to become a certified computer technician. He said he has loved computers and worked on them since he was 14. A telling moment came when he saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of a computer repair store in Grand Rapids. He put in an application. As he walked out the door, a man with an NEC decal on his work suit came in and asked for an application. “I knew there was no way I was going to get that job,” John said. “NEC is a major computer builder for businesses. I knew he had more credentials than I did.” Sarah, who moved to Grand Rapids after high school, held a series of jobs with ever lower pay. The best was at a bank where she handled applications for credit cards. When that bank sold out to another bank, she lost the job but got some severance pay. She used it to go to culinary arts school. “I thought it would be great but I ended up with low paying jobs in food service. I didn’t have the experience for fine dining, and there was more competition.” Like many other employees in fast food restaurants, she didn’t always get a full 40 hours a week and kept looking for something better. “Then my having gone from job to job worked against me because they saw me as not stable. But I’m a very hard worker and I enjoy work.” She’d worked after school in her father’s real estate office when she was in high school, she said, and helped care for her grandfather when he got Alzheimer’s. In Evart, Sarah stayed home with the new baby and John worked wherever he could, mostly cleanup type jobs with temp services. That didn’t bring in enough steady money so they applied for cash assistance. One of its requirements is going regularly to a Michigan Works office that offers job training and help with job searches, resumes and work skills. Recipients must show that they are actively seeking work. The Nailors received cash assistance for about a year. “Then they changed the rules,” John said. “You had to put in qualified applications. If you didn’t put in applications to places that were actually hiring, not just maybe hiring in the future, you would be put off. I thought, ‘Forget that! There’s no way. This is Michigan! Nobody’s hiring!’” He quickly summarized the local employment scene: A factory that hires through temp agencies, which didn’t count. A glass plant that closed and then reopened and gave preference to prior employees. A dairy where you have to have family that works there. Some mom and pops that employ only family. “I told them to keep their cash assistance. I was going to open my own business.” Nailor Services opened two years ago in a small building downtown that once housed an A & P. The best John can say about it is that “I’m still in business even though we don’t have enough business to get off food stamps.” He fixes computers that people bring in or he goes to their homes. He finds inexpensive programs and parts for his clients and recycles old computers. “People bring me computers they want to get rid of and I break them down and sell the metal and copper. That’s what gets me through the winter.” With Emily going to Head Start this fall, Sarah said she’ll have time to help him. The Nailors are due soon for a redetermination of their food stamp allotment of $669 a month, John said, and this worries them. “The state’s been cutting a lot for the budget,” he said. A proposal to throw out the earned income tax credit entirely was dropped in the state legislature but lawmakers recently shrank the benefit by about one fourth. ... Purchase answer to see full attachment