Date posted: 3-1-02

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A tough road

Single mom overcomes time demands to succeed in college

By Tony Ciampa
DeKalb News Service

DeKALB -- The question of where the food belongs, either on the plate or on Mom's sociology homework, is one battle Mary Ann Kolls takes on every day.

Kolls, a single mother and Northern Illinois University student, is living proof of the difficulties of raising a child and going to college. For the past five years, she has been working on her bachelor's degree in sociology and raising her daughter, Sabrina, 6.

"The hardest thing is trying to balance studying and being with her," said Kolls, 24. "It's a lot of work being a parent."

A year ago, Kolls left the comforts of living at home with her mother to live on her own for the first time in DeKalb. In Kolls' opinion, the transition to being a mother is something many of the girls from her hometown of Harvard, Ill., viewed wrongly when she became pregnant at age17.

"I think it was looked upon pretty badly because I was the first," she said. "The girls were pretty mean. Eventually, I dropped out of high school and home schooled my last year. The funny thing about it was that most of the girls who belittled me became pregnant themselves within a few years."

Kolls' struggle is hardly unique. In 1998, the U.S. Census Bureau stated that 56 percent of single-parent households had no other adult living in the house.

Laura Smart, an NIU associate professor who specializes in childcare, said many women must establish a core group that in some way helps with the development of the child.

"Single mothers have to handle all the tasks alone, assuming they don't have a roommate or some outside help," Smart said. " Childcare is beneficial to young children. Also, it gives the mother a break from constantly being with the child. In most societies, a mother does not care for her child alone."

Kolls finds it easier to go to classes now that her daughter is in first grade.

"It was extremely hard when she was little to go to college and raise her," she said. "I was always having trouble finding classes that fit my schedule."

NIU helps single parents by offering childcare on campus. In the past two semesters, the Campus Child Care Center has seen an increase from 30 percent to 37 percent in single-mother children at the center. The number typically hovers between 35 and 45 percent, said center director Chris Herrmann.

The university keeps no statistics on its numbers of single-parent students, because it only asks students for their marital status.

The NIU center, open Monday through Friday from 7:15 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., is looking at options to help schedule-strapped parents. Herrmann said the idea of having evening care to help single parents take additional classes has been talked about, but it does not look economically workable.

"Because we are an Illinois-licensed program, we would need to offer a fourth meal a day," Herrmann said. "All of these new standards would make it difficult to do. Everybody likes the idea, but we would probably only get two or three kids a night."

Smart and Herrmann agreed separately that the most important thing a single mother can do to help herself is finish getting a college degree.

"They should make sure they have backup help," Smart said. "And they should be very sure not to have another baby until they are established in their career. Research shows that it is much harder for a single parent to cope with two children than with one and the success rate of a single parent with one child is higher."

Single mothers at NIU can receive scholarship money from the Anne Kaplan Fund. The scholarship offers $400 toward childcare and is available to all full or part-time students who are single parents and near completion of a degree or certificate at NIU. Herrmann also said subsidy programs are available to pay childcare, but a student must work 10 hours a week to be eligible.

Hope keeps Kolls pressing forward. She hopes to finish her bachelor's degree in the next year and go for a master's degree in sociology in the next few years. One of the main reasons for her wanting to continue school was so her daughter could finish elementary school in a school she approved of.

"With all the grants and loans a person can get, it would be dumb not to go to school," Kolls said. "I will be better off and so will my daughter because of my education."

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Source list:
· (Mary Ann Kolls, NIU student)
· (Laura Smart, Associate Professor in Family, Consumer, and Nutrition Science at NIU, 753-6342)
· (Chris Herrmann, Director of the campus child center, 753-8482)