Evamarie Trimachi, a 41-year-old single mother and third-generation welfare recipient, earned an associate’s degree at Gateway Community College, moved on to a bachelor’s and is eyeing a masters. Federal education grants were essential for her move from “tax burden” to “tax payer,” she said as she called on her congresswoman to save those grants from the chopping block.
Trimachi (pictured) was one of over 100 students who gathered in a community room at Gateway to meet with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro on Thursday. New Haven’s congresswoman’s visit to Gateway came on the heels of a Republican proposed spending bill for the remainder of 2011, which passed the House of Representatives last week and moves to the Senate for approval next week. If passed, it would slash $4.9 billion from last year’s $63.7 billion U.S. Department of Education budget.
Students at Gateway gathered to tell their stories,so that DeLauro can have ammunition to fight the cuts when she heads back to D.C. Students also sought answers. They wanted an explanation for looming federal budget cuts that could effect their ability to continue their educations.
DeLauro (pictured) told students how the proposed budget would effect them personally. It would reduce funding for the Federal Pell Grant Program, which provides need-based grants to low-income students pursuing post-secondary education. According to the bill, students would be eligible for a maximum of $4015 in the upcoming year, down from $5,550.
“I want to hear from you directly about how these cuts would affect you,” DeLauro told students. “I can take your words and read them on the floor of the House.”
“It is a powerful testimony from people like yourselves,” she said. “You are the voice of this area, this country, and Congress needs to hear from you.”
Trimachi told DeLauro she came to Gateway looking for a life change. After receiving an associate’s degree from Gateway, she’s working on a bachelor’s and now aims to complete a masters in social work at Southern Connecticut State University.
“While I’m in school, I can’t work,” she said. “So I just wouldn’t have been able to attend college without Pell grants.” After tuition and books, she said, she had just enough to pay for groceries, bills, and necessities for her daughter. Pell helped with that, she said. She made the dean’s list most semesters, and now she’s employed. The grants were vital, she said, in her effort to remove herself from what she called “the system.”
“I remember being called a tax burden,” she said. “Now I’m a tax payer.”
Timothy Ross (pictured) took the microphone, detailing for DeLauro his progression from bad decision after bad decision to a life of education and self esteem at Gateway. “This place has done what a normal nine to five job couldn’t do for a guy like me,” he said. “And I don’t want to revert back — that scares me.”
We don’t want to live in fear and uncertainty about losing the grants that allow us to be here, he said.
“I understand that the country is under political and financial stress,” Ross nodded to his Congresswoman. “But you can teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”
Ross asked that DeLauro remember students’ faces and stories when she is doing the job she was elected to do.
Jasmine Carson, whose father passed away when she was young, grew up with a single, working mother. “I remember her crying every day about how she’d get us the next meal,” she said. “So I made up my mind I would attend college.”
Two years ago, Carson’s mother was diagnosed with a severe mental illness, she said. Her mother is now unable to work.
Carson told DeLauro she would not be able to attend school without the Pell Grant. I just wouldn’t be here, she said.
“I’d probably be flipping burgers for the rest of my life.”
“This all seems so incorrect to me,” second year Gateway student Shane Feyers (pictured) told DeLauro.
“I’m not blaming you personally,” he said. “I know you’ve done a lot to further education. But my question remains: How did we as a state and country go so wrong? And why of all things is education on the chopping block?”
Feyers statement was met with a round of applause and cheering from the roomful of students.
“Gateway likes to emphasize that the future is ours,” said Feyers. “But it seems more like the future is in the hands of politicians.”
In answer to his question, DeLauro pointed to what she called two unfunded and costly wars, and unfunded prescription drug benefit, and an economy tanked by the “deregulation of financial institutions which were allowed to take the money and run with an enormous amount of greed.”
The government responded, she said, with the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), and the stimulus package.
“The issue isn’t that we shouldn’t cut spending,” she said. “It’s where do we start?”
You don’t start with health care, she said. And you don’t start with education.