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Graduates not guaranteed work
By Lynn Proctor Windle, Staff Writer
Kathy Hines is typical of the Plano Housing Authority’s clientele.
She’s highly educated, highly motivated, but as Bruce Hornsby once put it in his ode to the poor, she “can’t buy a job.”
At 42, she is 15 hours short of a master’s degree in science, but she’s never earned more than $17,000 in any one year and has never bought a car brand new.
Her road to self sufficiency is long, hard and far from over.
Hines was a senior for seven years at the Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Miss., when she realized that she was spinning her wheels.
The last class she needed to graduate could never make. That was in the days before distance learning allowed students to pick up classes at other schools without leaving home.
She worked as a seamstress, a painter and a cake decorator just to make ends meet, unable to use the education she had already attained in the small college town near the Alabama state line.
Her brother talked her into visiting him in North Texas. Since she homeschooled her children, she packed them into the car for a road trip.
“I thought it would be educational. A field trip,” she said.
While here, her brother was convinced she should finish her degree at Texas Woman’s University in Denton.
Touring the college, “I was just doing what I was told,” Hines said, uncertain that she belonged there.
She also toured the University of North Texas. At the time, she had no idea that a conversation with a chemistry professor would change her life.
Understanding more now than ever that she needed to leave the Magnolia State, she returned home to think.
“I came home. I knew I needed to get out of Mississippi, but didn’t know how,” she said.
A month later, the chemistry professor called to ask if she was ready to move to Texas. The professor wanted to help her get the financial aid she needed to finish her degree at UNT.
That was April 2000. Hines promised the professor that she’d be back in Texas by May, though at the time she didn’t know how she’d pull it off.
So she sewed. And she painted. And she decorated cakes, putting back every cent she could spare.
A large sewing project brought in just enough for her to rent a “the biggest U-Haul I could find” and pay expenses on her one-way trip.
She packed up everything she and her kids owned and then asked her now former husband if he wanted to come along. “He said, ‘Have a nice life,’” she said. “And 13 hours later I was in Texas.”
Hines settled her brood in Denton, where she planned to finish her degree. A paperwork snafu prevented her from starting classes right away. To make ends meet, she landed a job at a Dallas hospital’s pathology department and decorated cakes on the side.
The pathology job didn’t last long because she fell asleep at the wheel driving home one day.
Fearing for her children’s future, she gave up the long commute to and from Denton. “My children mean a whole lot more to me than that,” she said.
Set back by Texas’ different requirements for a chemistry degree, she enrolled in North Central Texas College, a two-year community college located in Corinth, to pick up the extra hours she needed before transferring to the more expensive university.
She finally entered UNT in the summer of 2001, a year later than she’d planned, only to immediately face another obstacle. The father she barely new was dying of pancreatic cancer.
She dropped her courses and returned to Mississippi to watch her father die.
“He was sent home from the hospice to die. I was there a week getting to know him. That was all that I needed,” she said.
She skipped the funeral, returning to Texas to “really begin” her new life.
Hines finished a year at UNT before tragedy struck again. On first day of the 2002-03 school year, her fourth son, Xzavian, was hit by a dump truck and “left for dead,” she said. The little boy suffered numerous injuries. He would eventually recover from the physical trauma, but the emotional scars would force her to make hard decisions down the road.
Hines finally graduated with her bachelor’s degree in 2003. While the academic world welcomed women in science with open arms, the business world wasn’t as hospitable.
“Chemistry is a male-dominated field. I’ve had lots of doors slammed in my face,” she said. One door slammed the day she showed up to fill out the paperwork for a position she thought she’d won.
“They told me that there was a misunderstanding, that the job had already been filled.” Hines shrugged off the disappointment. “Life happens. I’ve seen it happen too many times,” she said.
Still she and her six children had to eat. She took a job selling memberships at a discount club chain. Even then, she had to fight for the job. Because of her academic credentials, she wasn’t considered a candidate likely to stay in a retail job.
She managed to persuade the store manager that she could sell store memberships and promised to make a management trainee look good in the process. And she did. The management trainee now has his own store. And like the store manager predicted, she did move on to a job in her career field.
In 2004, she took a job with an industrial gas manufacturer and moved her family to Plano. The job lasted a month before the company cut the position. Once again, she returned to decorating cakes, a skill that had saved her many times, yet she hated. And she was making a whopping $8 an hour. Hines also began to tutor math and chemistry. And she had to turn to the Plano Housing Authority to help keep a roof over her family’s head.
With chemistry proving a tough field to crack, she took her selling skills to an investment banking chain in Mesquite. The job appeared to show potential, even though it was commissions-based and income wasn’t always steady. However, the company paid for her to get her securities and insurance licenses and promised she could move to a Plano branch in a couple of months.
The transfer never happened, and it never panned out to be a lucrative as promised.
“I wasn’t making much money, barely enough to keep the utilities,” she said.
But she made the 25-mile drive for more than a year before an incident at Xzavian’s school made her realize that she needed to be near home.
“The school district started raising concerns about Xzavian’s withdrawn behavior and even said that abuse was suspected,” she said.
The school was unaware of his near-fatal accident. Once they understand the root of her son’s problem, the school district got him the extra help he needed. But “I realized I needed to be closer to home. I didn’t mind scarifying that job,” she said.
That was last year. Hines now realized she needed a job that would allow her the flexibility to be close to her children as well as make money.
“Kathy Ranson, the FSS coordinator, asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘Make a lot of money.’”
The Family Self Sufficiency is a program under the Plano Housing Authority, which helps people who are eligible for assisted housing to achieve economic independence from all public assistance.
Ranson reminded Hines that she’d once mentioned real estate. Ranson told Hines that she had found a grant that would pay for her schooling to become a licensed Realtor.
“I did five classes in three weeks in February, and began working in March,” she said.
As she was attending class, she didn’t realize the mortgage crises was bubbling underneath the surface of the already fragile housing industry and that home sales would plummet even further as the months wore on. Although she has nearly a dozen listings, she hasn’t had a single close. Her oldest son Michael, who is a junior at Baylor University in Waco, helps to pay her bills through his student loans.
Worried that she might not survive the housing crisis, Hines is once again turning to the world of academia. She’s in the process of earning her teaching certification from an alternative certification program. Science educators are always in demand, particularly women in science who can serve as role models. She hopes to teach in the Plano school district and complete her master’s degree, then maybe earn her doctorate.
Hines doesn’t want anybody to feel sorry for her. Far from it. She wants her story to help people understand that an education is important, as evident by the effort she puts into her own children’s learning, many of whom are accomplished in arts and languages such as Japanese.
Still she’s proof that a college degree doesn’t guarantee you’ll never need a little help.
Yet, despite all the setbacks, she’s upbeat, and she presses forward.
“My goal is self sufficiency. “I want to build a legacy,” she said. “There will be a point when I’ll be accomplished.”
Kathy also wants to help others. On Monday, the Plano City Council named Hines to the Plano Housing Authority’s Family Self Sufficiency Committee. As a committee member, she’ll serve as a liaison for FSS clients to the housing authority.
Contact Lynn Proctor Windle at lwindle@acnpapers.com
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