Every workday, Guadalupe resident Jovita Garcia gets up at 3:40 a.m. to make lunch for herself and her three children. A little after 5 a.m., she drops the girls—Yubanely, 10; Bettsy, 6; and Julyazareth, 2—off at the babysitter, and then drives to the fields.
For almost 12 hours, Jovita plants vegetables. She and the other fieldworkers line up behind the farm machines, quickly slipping seeds into the tilled earth. Everyone gets two 15-minute breaks and a half hour for lunch.
“The machine moves at a set pace; sometimes it’s hard for people to keep up,” Jovita recently told the Sun through a translator at the Guadalupe Family Services Center.
After work, she picks up the girls and they all head home. Jovita takes a shower and makes dinner for the whole family. What little time she has left before bed she spends with the children.
Jovita left Oaxaca, Mexico, for the United States when she was 17 years old. Her mother had just died, and her relationship with her father was strained.
Grief-stricken and alone, Jovita said she hoped she would die on the trip, but she survived.
“I realized if I could survive that, I could move forward and survive anything,” she said.
Jovita is glad to be in California now, but she still has trouble making ends meet. For the last three years, she’s been coming to the Guadalupe Family Services Center for food, clothing, parenting classes, and help with employment paperwork.
She said the services make her a better mother to her children.
“I feel like I have a better relationship with my girls,” she said. “I don’t feel like Supermom, but I feel more confident and I feel like I can be more of a friend to my children.”
Obviously, Jovita isn’t the only parent in Santa Barbara County struggling to provide for her family.
KIDS Network, the county’s advisory organization for issues impacting children and families, recently released its Children’s Scorecard for 2010. The annual report gathers data from various agencies and child-welfare groups to determine how the county’s youngest residents are doing.
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The scorecard assesses the rates of child abuse, juvenile crime, and childhood poverty, as well as families’ access to important resources, including health care, childcare, educational resources, and more.
“Our purpose is really to bring all of the information out there together and to make it user friendly for people who want a whole picture of local children,” KIDS Network coordinator Katharina Zulliger said.
“What really stands out to me this year is how well the report emphasizes the current economy and everything we’ve been reading in the news,” she said.
According to the scorecard, the number of Santa Barbara County children who qualified for free and reduced-cost school lunches—54 percent—was at the highest level of the decade this past year. Additionally, the number of children living below the federal poverty level increased from 14 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2010.
“We’re also seeing a lot more children going on public health insurance as opposed to employer-based insurance,” Zulliger said, adding that the statistic is indicative of the current unemployment rate.
The cities reporting the highest percentages of families living in poverty include Guadalupe, Lompoc, and Santa Maria.
Zulliger said there are multiple reasons why North County has more impoverished residents.
“I think there are three factors,” she said. “First, there are more families living in the North County as opposed to the South County, which is more of a retirement community.”
The standard of living is also lower in North County, she said, with fewer high-paying jobs and fewer supportive services.
“But that is slowly changing,” she said, adding that government and other agencies are starting to catch up with the North County’s “explosive growth rate.”
On a positive note, the scorecard reports that the overall rate of substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect declined from high points in 2006 and 2007. The county’s 2010 rate of abused and neglected children comes in below the statewide rate.
According to the report, general neglect—meaning a caregiver’s failure to provide adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care—was consistently the No. 1 cause of investigations. The three most frequently requested resources for families continue to be parenting classes, mental health counseling, and access to substance abuse treatment.
“It’s difficult to tell what this year will bring, so I don’t want to minimize the problem [of child abuse] at all,” Zulliger said.
The children most at risk for abuse, she said, are babies younger than a year old.
“They’re vulnerable because they can’t do anything for themselves. They can’t talk. They’re also the most isolated because they don’t go school,” Zulliger explained. “[Infancy] is also a stressful time for families. There isn’t as much support out there.”
Luckily, organizations throughout the county are working diligently to change that sense of isolation by giving families access to essential resources and services. There are also numerous countywide initiatives designed to help at-risk families.
For example, officials at the Guadalupe Family Services Center are currently creating a community collaborative effort through which to provide access to more services. They’re contacting local parents to find out what they need most, and reaching out to the community to see that those needs are met.
Zulliger said she hopes the scorecard will inspire local businesses and individuals to respond to the needs in their community.
“My hope is that people will utilize the information [in the scorecard] for some kind of positive action,” she said. “All the issues in the report are related. The problem at the heart of most of these issues is poverty.
“It takes the entire community to meet certain goals,” she continued. “If children are sick or if children aren’t going to school, that doesn’t help anyone.”
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 25 – Sep 1, 2011.
