Growing up in the 'other Maine'

EASTPORT — Jillian Higgins stands on what used to be her home. It is a heap of twisted orange and blue metal, blackened bits of clothing, broken dishes, splintered pieces of wood, glass and tile.

Here on this charred mound, Jillian, her mom, her two brothers, seven dogs and two cats lived for three years. Their trailer rested on a patch of land four miles from town on a road with little traffic, few neighbors and a rusting water tower.

The family always had struggled, moving in and out of a half-dozen apartments and trailers since Jillian was 5. But last winter was "really, really bad," Jillian says.

No running water. No heat. Little food. None of the kids went to school. Out of work and hope, Jillian's mother walked out, abandoning her children in early March. She has yet to come back.

Jillian was 15; her brothers 16 and 18. A few weeks later, neighbors complained of barking dogs. When the police entered their home, the kids were gone. There was a dead dog in the bathroom, a dead kitten on the couch. The skin hung off the bones of the other six dogs and cat. The landlord eventually burned the trailer, because of its condition.

The local papers wrote about an animal cruelty investigation and one report noted at the end of the story that there were some kids left behind, too. "Like I felt bad for the dogs and stuff but that's all they wrote about," Jillian says. "They never wrote anything about us, the children."

Today Jillian and her brothers live with a family friend, 20 miles from the ash heap that was their home. They live in Washington County, the poorest county in Maine, in a state with the fastest-growing poverty rate in the nation, according to the U.S. Census.

Tucked on the eastern tip of the state, Washington County is one of Maine's most geographically isolated pockets. Known for its sweeping blueberry barrens, it has Maine's highest unemployment rate, 9 percent, double the state average for 2002.

With little money or opportunity, people are abandoning Washington County in record numbers. Hard hit in the tough economy are kids, the generation that will inherit the social and financial ills of their hometowns. "You've got two scenarios," says Keith Harvie, communication director for the Maine Education Association. "One is that the brighter, talented kids are getting out of these towns. They're going where the jobs are to southern Maine or out of state.

"Then you've got the kids who stay. If their towns are shrinking, the schools are getting smaller, and the jobs are gone, you end up with a lot of discouraged kids with no future."

Of Washington County's 8,000 children, nearly a quarter live in poverty. More than half the school kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, a national indicator of poverty.

"Kids are forgotten up here," says Jana Townsend, Jillian's new legal guardian. "It's not that nobody knows about them. They're just ignored because there's too many of them with too many troubles."

Maine is no stranger to poverty, especially in sparsely populated counties. For generations, families have survived by working the land, fishing and lobstering, and laboring in factories and mills.

But steady job losses, persistent population drops and factory closings have made it tougher for families in some Maine towns to survive. At the same time, traditional assistance programs for housing and general assistance are not as generous as in decades past. When help is provided, Maine taxpayers increasingly pick up the tab.

Maine leads the country with the fastest growing poverty rate, tied with Arkansas and Mississippi.

Maine lost the largest percentage of manufacturing jobs in the nation in the last three years, some 17,800, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. Shoe and shirt factories, paper and logging jobs gone by the thousands.

Poverty-related enrollment in Medicaid rose from 24,100 to 48,400 from 1997 to 2002, with the biggest jump from 2000 to 2001, when enrollment doubled, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In 1993, Maine received $22.7 million; in 2002, $17.9 million. Federal dollars for rural home construction fell during the same time period, as did federal spending on Section 8 vouchers, another source for rental assistance.

Many of the state's Section 8 housing vouchers - a primary source of rental assistance for poor people - were frozen for most of 2003, because of overwhelming demand, according to housing officials. The Maine State Housing Authority turned away hundreds of families needing help to pay rent.

Need for emergency housing is so great that 3,752 families, children and single adults were turned away from shelters in 2002, according to the state housing authority. It was more than double the families and single adults turned away in 1998.

Poor counties saw greater need for temporary family shelter. The number of homeless bed-nights used in Knox County - where 40 percent of the children live in low-income families - nearly quadrupled between 1998 to 2002.

Communities in sparsely populated counties are struggling to keep their professionals, dentists, doctors. For example, 4,000 people remain on a waiting list at Penobscot Community Health Center to see a dentist. The Bangor clinic opened a year ago and serves many rural communities.

Economists and policy-makers are unsure how to deal with such enormous need at a time of tight or declining resources. The remoteness of rural families in poverty heightens the problem.

The stories and faces of Maine's rural poor children like Jillian Higgins are barely visible. They may be hidden or forgotten as they endure hardship in places too small to be called towns, on dirt roads or patches of land scattered among Maine's 33,215 square miles.

They live in a state that is so rural, so big it covers nearly as many square miles as the other five New England states combined. Today economists and state officials talk about two Maines - the populous and growing region of southern Maine, and the other Maine, a region of declining prosperity and hope.

The troubles in the "other Maine" - rising poverty, increasing drug use, persistent job loss and population drops - mirror a national trend spreading across the Great Plains, Appalachia, Wyoming and other states with sprawling tracts of undeveloped land far from metropolitan areas.

"It's important to understand what Maine is witnessing, clearly other places are experiencing," says Mark Lapping, a professor of planning and community development at University of Southern Maine's Muskie School of Public Service. "There's a very large conversion going on in the Great Plains. Depopulation has been going on there for decades, and areas of rural South and West have seen this as well."

Maine, along with other rural states, suffers from neglect. "The economy and much of society has made rural America peripheral to the mainstream," Lapping says. "Government and the business world is increasingly discounting families and businesses" in rural areas, "considering them not necessary."

As towns lose jobs, people and hope, it is the state's children who are most in peril. Kids like Jillian sleep in unheated trailers, miss meals, drop out of school, go without medical or dental care. Their families face bills they can't pay.

They collect food from local pantries, pawn valuables, bounce checks, eat at soup kitchens, and pick through second-hand clothes at local churches.

Drug abuse plagues Maine's troubled counties like Washington, which suffers one of the state's worst addictions of OxyContin, a painkiller taken in highly concentrated doses by abusers. Some small towns in Maine are spiraling into a cycle of despair similar to the urban decay of inner cities, when the middle class started moving to suburbs in the 1960s.

"We call them rural ghettos," says Joseph Donnermeyer, a sociology professor at Ohio State University. "One of the key changes you see that brings about this decay is the decreasing of stable populations. If you have a stable population, you have fewer problems.

"Rural communities that have a history of mining, timbering and transient populations, combined with persistent poverty, tend to have higher rates of crime, domestic violence and substance abuse," he says. "You end up with towns that have more problems than big cities."

Left behind are families with uncertain futures. Jobs that don't pay much more than minimum wage. Shrinking schools with fewer kids. Towns with dwindling tax revenues.

"When the mills shut down, the population goes down, the number of schoolchildren goes down and the resources go with it," says Harvie of the Maine Education Association, which represents 25,000 state educators.

"You see schools make tough choices on whether to consolidate their science program, cut their advanced placement classes. You see schools that used to be Class A basketball powerhouses downsize to Class C.

"When the mill jobs go, the tax base gets smaller and a lot of these towns are forced with some tough choices."

From the 1960s forward, the country's political and economic base has flourished in the suburbs. At the same time, agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing and manufacturing jobs, all traditional sources of income for rural areas, have suffered steady decline.

"At the turn of the century, 30 percent of the country were farmers; now it only takes 3 percent of the population to provide us with food," says Richard Sherwood, who studies population changes at the Maine State Planning Office.

"It takes a huge machine a day to do what it took a crew of 12 people in a week to do. It's not that the rural economy is bad, it's because we're increasing productivity or losing jobs to cheaper markets overseas."

Sherwood has studied Maine population trends for nearly 30 years. If the economy of the state's isolated counties doesn't improve, he expects Maine's small towns will continue to shrink.

"It'll be a slower migration than it was in the last decade, but some of these towns will fall to minimum populations," Sherwood says. "Simply because you can't keep draining these areas forever."

As more Maine towns suffer migration, job losses and factory closings, as the demand for child welfare and general assistance rises, the entire state pays the tab.

"Your state income, sales tax, excise tax, car registration, hunting licenses, they all go into a very large kitty," Lapping says. "And that money is reallocated to create equity all over the state."

If the state is continually tending to economic crises in its northern and eastern counties, there is little money left for creating new jobs, new opportunities, says Charles Colgan, professor of public policy with the Muskie School.

"The resources that are going to rescuing parts of the economy that are failing could just as easily be going into encouraging the economy to grow," Colgan says.

"If you're continually throwing out a life preserver to save people, you're not going to make much progress on your voyage."

Pencils are a small measure of rural poverty at tiny Somerville Elementary School in Lincoln County.

"There are kids here who are concerned if their pencils are missing, because there are limited amounts of pencils in the homes," says Principal Jeffrey Aronson.

Aronson is both principal and teacher at Somerville Elementary School. About three-quarters of his 52 schoolchildren qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Like many families, Aronson's school is on a tight budget. It is too small and too strapped for cash to afford a guidance counselor or full-time nurse. Every 2 1/2 weeks, a nurse visits to check schoolchildren for health problems and perform ear and eye testing.

There are no doctors or dentists, no gas stations, not even a small store in the town of 509. There are only two paved roads in town; the rest are dirt. The town hall is located at the school.

When children need counseling, they must wait months for help, and travel at least half an hour or more to a bigger city or a different county.

The children's museum is 90 minutes away in Bangor. Most of the schoolchildren's parents must travel 30 minutes to an hour or more to find work. "When we do school field trips, we often can't get parents to come because they're working one and two jobs that are usually far from their homes," Aronson says.

Sometimes children come to school without warm clothing, school snacks or notebooks and pencils.

"The parents care about their kids, but there aren't a lot of luxuries," Aronson says. "It's a small thing but it'd be nice if every kid had a dictionary at home. Unfortunately we know that's not the case."

Tina Wormell is assistant principal of Lubec Consolidated School. Bare necessities are hard to come by in many of the homes of her 208 schoolchildren.

"If we're not the poorest town, we're close to it," says Wormell, who grew up in Lubec, a town of 1,600 on the eastern tip of Maine. "For some kids, they come in on the first day of school with new clothes and you can tell by the look on their face it's like Christmas for them."

Twenty sardine-packing plants once thrived here. They're all closed now. The last sardine plant closed two years ago and another 150 jobs were lost.

Closed, too, are the hardware store, the car wash, the waterfront hotel, the convenience store, the laundromat, a waterfront restaurant. Peacock Canning, another big employer, scaled back two years ago, cutting 54 of 80 jobs.

"People work hard to make a living here," Wormell says. "Parents go out on 30-degree days, digging clams to provide for their families."

Some 75 percent of her schoolchildren qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. There is no principal at the school. Wormell fills that job and the role of assistant principal. The school shares a guidance counselor with another school in the county. The music teacher also comes once a week.

The guidance counselor comes once a week to help schedule, counsel, and encourage students to apply to colleges. But chances are stacked against them. Only 15 percent of Washington County's population holds a bachelor's degree, less than half the percentage for Cumberland County.

At Lubec Consolidated School, the slim staff does its best to educate the town's children. But the school faces other cuts after losing $15,000 this year from its budget.

"Our original proposed budget was $2.1 million, $66,000 less than last year's," Wormell says. "But the townspeople cut $15,000 from it. That's quite a chunk of change for us."

When Wormell hears other principals mourn the loss of money for sports, she can't help but compare their troubles with her school. "Other schools complain about losing their JV swim team and we don't even have a school guidance counselor," she says.

One of the most difficult challenges her schoolchildren face is isolation. It's 11 miles down Route 189 just to get to U.S. Route 1. It's 2 1/2 hours to Bangor, the nearest city offering her students testing for emotional, psychological or physical problems.

"If you're looking beyond any general tests, parents have to take their kids on a five-hour trip," Wormell says. "Some parents can't afford the time off from their jobs to do that or the tank of gas."

And because they're so far away from Bangor and doctors who offer specialty care, children must wait six months to a year for appointments.

"We've got a young kid now with emotional problems, and we've been waiting two months to try and get him evaluated for behavioral issues," Wormell says. "That's a long time when a child needs help."

Scott Lane isn't homeless but he can't afford to live in his Ashland apartment in Aroostook County.

He can't afford to pay the $500 rent for a two-bedroom home, plus cover child care and feed his three little girls.

Lane quit school at Katahdin High when he was 15 to find a job in the northern Maine woods, just like his father. He's earned a living that way for 13 years. "I've cut wood, driven skidders," Lane says. "But the business got so bad, you never knew when you were going to get a paycheck."

Lane knew he had to find steady work when the children's mother left seven months ago. He found a job this summer at the local wood mill, Nexfor Fraser, in Masardis, where he sweeps floors and shovels sawdust. But his hours were cut recently, and his take-home pay dwindled. "We've never had it this rough," Lane says. "I can't pay the bills because I'm putting food on the table for my kids."

To get to work by 5 in the morning, he wakes his girls up at 3:45 a.m. He brings them downstairs, half-asleep, to his sister-in-law's apartment. "They don't cry about it," Lane says. "They know daddy's got to get up early to go to work."

Chantel, his oldest daughter, is 5. She attends kindergarten at Ashland Elementary School. Sometimes she falls back to sleep when her daddy brings her down to her aunt's apartment in the dark. Other days, she stays awake from 4 a.m. until she gets on the school bus.

Lane had managed to keep up with his bills when he worked 60 hours a week at the mill but in early November his hours were cut to 40. "This week's check was $140 less than usual," Lane said before Thanksgiving. "I can't even afford to keep my car on the road now."

Lane called the Presque Isle housing authority last month to ask about a Section 8 voucher to help pay his rent. A worker there told him there wouldn't be anything available for at least a year.

Lane expects he'll have to move his family back home to his parents' house in Sherman, another town in Aroostook County.

"It's going to be a 56-mile ride to work but I don't have any choice," Lane says. "I'm going to have to do something till I get on my feet."

"Chantel just wrote a letter to Santa at school, asking for dolls and Barbies, new clothes, new sneakers," Lane says. "I told her, Santa will do the best he can do. Just don't forget he's got a lot of little girls and boys to buy for."

Lane isn't sure there will be much of a Christmas. He can't afford anything beyond necessities.

"My little girl asked for a coloring book and crayons and I bought them for her but I really had to think about it," he says. "My oldest, Chantel, tells me, 'Don't worry, Daddy, I know you'd buy us toys if you could.' "

Long before police opened the door of the Eastport trailer, people knew Jillian Higgins and her brothers were in trouble. Jana Townsend says she called the Department of Human Services three times in the past two years.

"The police knew about these kids, the schools knew about them, DHS knew about them," says Townsend, Jillian's new legal guardian. "But no one did anything. These kids had a lot of problems and I don't think anyone wanted to deal with it."

But this is a county where everyone is strapped for resources. Ten DHS caseworkers are assigned to investigate child neglect and abuse in Washington County, an area twice as big as Rhode Island, covering 2,528 square miles.

DHS workers explained that Jillian and her brothers faced foster or group homes if Townsend didn't take them in. Even after Townsend welcomed Jillian into her home, there were more obstacles. It took five months before Jillian could get to see a therapist.

In early winter, Jillian was on another waiting list, this one for a case manager, someone who can help her with her emotional and psychological problems.

"Jill's got a lot of problems, a lot of anger," Townsend says. "It's going to take her a long time to get through some of her feelings."

There are other basic needs. Jillian's teeth are chipped and yellowed with neglect. Townsend can't find a dentist in the Calais area accepting more Medicaid patients.

"What services there are here are so overwhelmed with people and kids that it's hard to find help for someone like Jillian," Townsend says. "It's like Washington County is a forgotten area. And kids like Jillian are left behind."

For most of last winter, Jillian and her brothers slept with two and three jackets and piles of blankets to stop their shivering.

"Sometimes, when we'd get five bucks, we'd buy some fuel, so at least we'd be warm for a couple hours," Jillian says. "But most of the time we were so cold. So cold."

There was not enough food in the house or, at times, anything to eat. "We were always hungry," Jillian says. When they were desperate, Jillian and her brothers asked the local pantry for food. Her mother never applied for food stamps, Jillian says.

Jillian's older brother, Brett, remembers the drinking. He was 18 when his mother left in March. "We drank a lot, me and my mom," he says. "Just vodka, straight usually."

Brett remembers his mother received a monthly check for $500 for "like child support or something," from their father in Massachusetts. "Every time we got that check, we'd get some alcohol and food for like a week," he says.

In October 2002, their stepfather left. Their mother didn't work, so there was little money for food, heat and water.

"Near the end of living there, it was kind of like every man for himself," Brett says.

Police came to the trailer on March 9, 2003. Neighbors reported barking dogs. By then, Jillian's mother had been gone about a week. She hasn't been seen since.

"The first thing we saw when we looked through the door was the dead cat," says Eastport Police Chief Matthew Vinson. "The other dog was in the bathroom, dead, covered with a blanket. The rest of the dogs were starving, the skin hanging off their bones.

It wasn't the first time Vinson and his officers had visited the trailer at 3 Janney St.

"It was an ongoing issue with us, DHS and the health department for years," Vinson says. "DHS could never get enough to remove the kids. They always came real close but never enough."

The same was true for the town health officer. She knocked on the trailer door several times but Jillian's mom never let her in.

"Do I feel like we failed them?" Vinson asks. "I do. It was one of those things (where) we couldn't do what needed to be done, and I feel real bad for those kids."

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