MISHAWAKA — A miniature pinscher and two cats scurry across the floor in this one-story, 1,840-square-foot home with three bedrooms, two baths and a Jacuzzi on East Third Street.

A 20-year-old box turtle, oxymoronically named Taxi, stays put.

Things never used to be this good for the Chambers family. Not when Sandy Chambers, while sitting at her kitchen table on an early April morning, remembers their first home: “a little cracker box” with mix-and-match furniture and a 7-foot-long couch they found in someone’s trash.

But she and her husband were so proud of that place. It was all they could afford after the two teens discovered Sandy was pregnant, part of the reason Sandy dropped out of Riley High School in South Bend.

The 35-year-old understands what it means to struggle without a high school diploma. She knows what it means to be slighted because of her current GED. And she knows all too well how it feels to worry about whether her husband’s primary bread-winning job will exist tomorrow.

“We know what life’s like without that education,” she says.

The lure to work

Sandy’s parents’ divorce at age 10 set the stage for her life, she says, in between sips of black coffee. When she reached middle school, the first thing she noticed was the way her parents’ strictness dissipated like vapor into thin air.

She moved in with her mom at a house on Allen Street in South Bend, quickly realizing her mother’s rules were much less rigid than those of her father, 59-year-old Greg Burris, she said. Her mother worked second shift as a Hardee’s restaurant manager probably 60 to 70 hours a week.

Both of her parents have high school diplomas, but neither have degrees beyond that, Sandy added.

Toward the latter part of her ninth-grade year at Riley, truancy became a real issue for Sandy, who had moved around so much in light of her parents’ marital problems.

She eventually transferred to Penn High School during the second semester of her sophomore year at the demand of her father, who lived in Mishawaka at the time. But that’s when her behavior “got out of hand” as she became “lippy” and even more unruly and truant.

When she was expelled, her father said he realized she had gotten “lost in the shuffle” at the large school.

That same year — 1990 — Sandy landed a summer job working full time at Hardee’s, where even a mere $4 an hour made it hard for her to go back to Riley. She was earning money. Not only that, but she found out that her boyfriend, now 33-year-old husband Alvin Chambers, had gotten her pregnant.

“I was tickled to death that she was going to have a baby,” Burris said of his first reaction, “but not under these circumstances.”

Alvin — whom Sandy met through a friend at Riley in 1989 — also had truancy issues at Jackson Intermediate School but finished his sophomore year at LaSalle High School because he was mandated to do so by the court, Sandy said.

Still, she did go back to Riley during the fall of what would have been her junior year had she not been expelled. But after a while, she just left, realizing it was easier to work.

Her dad couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I was sick to my stomach,” Burris said, recalling the news that his daughter had dropped out of high school. Still, she promised him that she would earn her GED, and he believed her.

A new baby

Daughter Naomi Chambers, now 17, was born in 1991 when Sandy herself was 17 years old and Alvin was 15, she said.

When Alvin turned 16, Sandy said, he got a full-time job at Hardee’s and later left to take a better-paying job — probably worth $4.75 or $5 an hour — at the now-nonexistent Philadelphia Deli in downtown South Bend.

After looking at her daughter and her life that year, Sandy knew she wanted something better for her baby. So she started GED classes when Naomi was 3 or 4 months old, she remembered.

“I feel that the one thing that I’ve never had is that stick-to-it kind of personality because I’ve never had to,” Sandy said, stressing that she wants Naomi and her other child, 11-year-old Cheyenne, to finish the projects they start.

Sandy earned her GED in 1992 at Brown Intermediate Center, during which her dad “cried like a baby,” he said. She then studied business management at Ivy Tech Community College for a year and a half.

But she took a semester off after experiencing a death in her husband’s family, and she never went back. Her husband at the time also was working full time at a factory, and the two shared a car, so transportation was difficult.

That’s when Sandy ended up getting a job at Things Remembered, working her way up to store manager. She’d love to go back to school now, but she envies those who are financially able to do that and run a household, too.

“Education is the last thing on my plate,” she says.

Her father, who lives in Osceola, is a pipe fitter, one of eight maintenance people remaining at the AM General Hummer H2 plant after the recent layoffs of about 400 workers. He’s been there almost seven years and is relieved he’s still there because “I’m 59 years old, and it’s hard to find another job, especially the quality jobs we have over there.”

Burris’ main concern for today’s students is that many aren’t taking time to learn trades skills, and many of these same jobs are going overseas anyway.

“Without help from parents, the school pretty much — their hands are tied,” Burris said of Mishawaka High School and its 59 percent graduation rate last spring. “When a kid comes in with a closed mind, there’s not a lot you can do.”

Focusing on grades

Naomi’s report card hangs on the refrigerator in the Chambers’ kitchen, touting a 4.0 that brings her mother to tears as she dreams about her daughter’s graduation.

“That will be as rewarding to me as it is to her,” she said with an emotional beam.
Sandy had different emotions for a young man who would have been a junior at Mishawaka High School this year but whom she recently saw working full time at a supermarket.

“It’s great to have a paycheck now,” she said, “but if he had a wife and had kids and had a car payment and had rent, he wouldn’t make it.”

That’s the problem she has with the state’s law allowing students to drop out with parental consent under age 18. Even at age 16, they’re “still a child,” Sandy said, pointing out that those same students couldn’t vote or buy tobacco with their parents’ consent.

In a group of more educated people in the workplace, Sandy still feels stilted sometimes because of her GED. She now works part time for Hallmark Cards after working for 15 years in nonprofits, most recently at the Literacy Council of St. Joseph County as well as at Hannah’s House and REAL Services.

About school and the future

Everything is so knowledge-based now that it’s “scary,” Sandy said, adding that her husband works 55 hours a week as a general laborer at the AM General H1 plant in Mishawaka.

“I don’t think a high school diploma’s going to cut it,” she said of industry jobs disappearing.

Right now, the family is living “paycheck to paycheck” with plans to help Naomi apply for scholarships and help her with student loans, Sandy said. And with gas prices rising — even as she plans to take Cheyenne and her 10-year-old second cousin, Thaias Burris-Pruitt, to a track meet this April morning at Clay High School — the worries rise, too.

“Honestly, I worry about my husband every day,” Sandy said, explaining that if he and countless other employees are laid off at the same time, the job market for them would become even more competitive. “When this war’s over, what will this mean for my husband, who makes military Humvees?”

At Mishawaka High, Naomi says dropping out — no matter how frequent it becomes — still has a stigma.

But students often call it quits because they are involved in drugs or other destructive habits, or because their parents aren’t involved in their lives or are too lenient on them, Naomi said.

“The school can’t do everything about it,” Naomi said, explaining that she feels the problems stem from kids who lack responsibility and hang with the wrong crowds. “People say it’s a bad school, but I don’t think so.”

As Sandy looks about her home, she realizes she could be sitting in a government-funded apartment with a chip on her shoulder because of her past experiences.

“I could wallow in it,” she said, “or I could pull myself up out of it. ... We are the choices we make.”