Mina Miller, 29, Burlington, is concerned about the cost of the living, and the need for more job training.
HOW CAN WE HELP PROVIDE MORE JOB TRAINING FOR WORKERS?
Mina Miller, 29, lives in Burlington and works in housekeeping at the local 36-bed hospital. She is on her second marriage and she and her husband, who is on disability, live in a three-bedroom trailer. Miller’s youngest daughter lives with them and attends Head Start, a federal program that promotes school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families. Miller is currently taking online classes and hoping to graduate next May with an associate’s degree in business. She presently serves on a policy council for Head Start parents and as a Coffey County representative with the multi-county Board of Trustees for the East Central Kansas Economic Opportunity Corp., a community action agency that seeks to eliminate the causes and conditions of poverty in Anderson, Coffey, Douglas, Franklin, Johnson, Lyon, Miami, Morris and Osage counties. She’s greatly concerned about taxes and the potential of “Obamacare” to raise her health insurance costs, which already cut deeply into her take-home pay. She worries
any more deductions from her paycheck will make it that much harder for her family to make ends meet each month. The government takes so much in taxes. I gross about $800 and something every two weeks and I only bring home $500. They (her employer) take $300 out for either taxes or my insurance ... One good thing is that gas is actually halfway going down right now. So people can afford to drive to their work. But when it goes back up, what exactly are people going to be able to do? I’d like to have an office job but the problem is … whenever you get out of school, unless you have experience, nobody around is going to hire you. I think if we just had a little bit more training, even for people out of school … that way, if you apply for a job, you can honestly say, here I have this little bit of training instead of, “Hey, I have no training but I want that job.” … [Kansas needs] more job training and more programs for people who are not at the bottom end of poverty … stuff where they can live a little easier.