Affordable housing can help single mothers complete college

(NewsNation) — As a single mother, Sara Springman has to juggle a job at a local hospital and raising her two-year-old daughter.

She was finding it difficult to afford rent at her apartment. “It was becoming a really tough time,” she said.

But a coworker informed her about the Anderson Scholar House, a program that offers affordable housing, mentoring and other resources for single mothers who want to pursue a college degree.

“I realized, like I need to change something and I need to do something more with my life. And just working the job I had wasn’t hardly getting me by,” she said. “So I realized I do need to get a degree and I do need to do something so the fact that this program came to me at that time is like a blessing.”

Springman was able to move into the Anderson Scholar House, which in based in the Indiana town of Anderson. It consists of a pair of apartment buildings. Those buildings were purchased in 2021 by the community action agency JobSource, which wanted to expand social services in the county.

They became an affiliate of Family Scholar House, which has been operating housing for single mothers pursuing a college degree out of the Louisville, Kentucky, area for the past 25 years. Attending college as a single mother can be difficult because of the time and money needed to simultaneously raise a child and pursue a degree.

The Anderson Scholar House helps its mothers, who are called scholars, with a range of services from rent that is subsidized by HUD vouchers to childcare. The exact financial arrangement differs for each scholar, but the goal is to make sure they don’t live with too much financial stress.

“Basically we try to keep their exposure on a monthly basis below so that they have enough to go into savings,” explained Briana Price, the director of strategic programs for Madison County JobSource.

As an example, Price said that if a scholar is told that they need to pay $200 a month towards rent under the terms of the HUD voucher, her team would first work with the scholar to go over their household budget.

“If we see that you can’t really afford that and still have enough money to pay for gas and clothing and everything else then we’re going to probably allow them to do volunteer work or cleaning the hallway for us and then that will go towards their rent payment or their voucher,” Price said.

The Anderson Scholar House opened fairly recently, welcoming its first set of scholars in August 2022. They’ve had one scholar finish her Associates degree, but others are still working towards their degrees.

Family Scholar House has graduated a much larger number of scholars in the Louisville area. As of 2023, their scholars have earned 808 degrees and 84 of their children have graduated high school and gone onto college. A number of scholars have also gone onto become home owners.

“We’ve had over 100 of our participants purchase their own homes,” said Kristie Adams, the Chief Learning Officer at Family Scholar House.

The application process to enter the housing takes at least six months, and it includes completing workshops and training and getting enrolled in school full-time.

The program does face resource constraints, however. Price said that they sometimes have deal with a lack of capacity at child care facilities; other times, making sure everyone has adequate transportation is a challenge.

But the Indiana legislature recently approved funding to allow Anderson Scholar House that could allow it to expand.

“That is a huge leap forward for us,” Price said.

Springman started online classes at nearby Ivy Tech in January. She will be attending in-person classes later this year with the intention of getting an Associate’s Degree and being able to get a better job in the health field.

“Going into the fall it’ll be the first time since high school that I’ll be taking in-person classes. And so I know that’s going to be difficult, but I know that I’m not going to be alone and I know I’ll always have the support I need here,” she said.