What can Utah State University do for single moms?

USU needs this type of program to help more single moms get an education. Read on, I am sure you will agree with me.

      One of the minds in Cleveland I admire the most belongs to Denise Reading.
Where most people see only problems, she sees solutions.
  
     She was in her first job as a professional, as Baldwin-Wallace College's student life director, when a student tearfully confided that her younger sister, a bright student with a full ride to another college, had gotten pregnant in her senior year of high school.  Her sister would have to give up her dream of going to college, she cried.

    The year was 1990. Reading had heard similar stories, and it spurred her to type up a letter to Baldwin-Wallace's president. This college claims to support students, she wrote, so why don't we back that promise up by going out on a limb for single parents? She suggested converting a campus building into a residence for single moms, and channeling existing financial aid toward covering their tuition, room and board. "I didn't have any children, I didn't know anything about social services," she remembers with a laugh.
 
     But it seemed to her that if students had shown the ability to succeed in college, the door shouldn't be slammed because of a pregnancy. It was a cheeky move. Very few U.S. colleges had tried anything like it.
But Reading persuaded the president to launch its SPROUT program, or Single Parents Reaching Out for Unlimited Tomorrows, during the next school year.

     I wrote about it back then, interviewing the four young mothers who enrolled. One of them was Tara Stephens, whose sister had cried on Reading's shoulder. Stephens arrived at Baldwin-Wallace with a 3.7 grade-point average and a 9-month-old daughter. Her little girl, Andrianna, spent her earliest years eating meals in the college dining hall and going with Mom to meetings in the student union.

    Government vouchers pay for the day care of SPROUT kids. The young moms qualify for other government aid, but director Julie Candela drums into their heads that these are benefits they shouldn't use.
"We teach the women not to take anything they don't need, and to value what taxpayers are providing for them. They are on the road to becoming the next generation of taxpayers who will help those who come behind them," says Candela.

    Candela runs a tight ship, and not every mom can deal with SPROUT's strict rules. But of the 99 women who have enrolled since 1990, 62 have attained college degrees.
That's 62 persistent women who are now prepared to earn far more than the $6,900 average annual income of their peers ages 18-35 who first had a child at 17 or younger.

    SPROUT, which has expanded to serve 12 women annually, held a 20th anniversary celebration last year. Reading thought she would explode with joy as she looked around the room filled with well-heeled graduates.
    
     And then she saw Tara Stephens, now a business systems analyst at Progressive Insurance who goes by her married name of Tara Lee. Reading hugged her -- and this time Reading was the one crying.
Through tears, she glimpsed a young woman standing near Lee.
"This couldn't be," Reading thought.
But it was. Baby Andrianna is now a cum laude graduate of Hiram College, with plans to go to medical school.

    I look at SPROUT's success and I know that education is one of the best tools for breaking the cycle of teen pregnancy handed down from mother to daughter. The cycle is a big problem in Cleveland, where 76 percent of babies born have single moms.

    SPROUT graduates usually don't have more kids out of wedlock, and neither do their kids.
For a glimpse of how powerful is the program's reach, all we need to do is look at the children of its earliest graduates. They're in college themselves.

     Reading, who now heads her own company, Solon-based Global Corporate College, has a knack for helping teens beat the odds. She also created the Baldwin-Wallace Scholars program that is helping young men from Cleveland schools find their way to college.

      It all started, she reflects, the day she dreamed up SPROUT. "Something in me said, 'Do it.' "
She feels thankful that "Whatever was in me didn't just say, 'Oh, that's a bad problem' and walk away."
I'm grateful too. see full article