Michigan Punishes Mom for Her Daughter’s Brain Cancer

It was meant to be ‘tough love,’ but a Michigan law kicking mothers off welfare when their kids miss school has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

To say Lisa was sick doesn’t really begin to describe her troubles. The 12-year-old was racked by seizures and disabled by strokes from the brain surgery she underwent to remove a tumor. After battling cancer throughout her life, Lisa required “assistance in dressing, eating, and elimination of urine and feces,” as a doctor noted.
She most certainly could not go to school, as the superintendent, principal, and head of special leducation in her school district were all aware.
“For the past two and a half years of her life, she was in and out of the hospital,” her mother, Martha, said. “She went from being this chatterbox to not talking at all.”
But someone else at the school nevertheless dropped Lisa from enrollment after seeing she had been absent since spring 2012, when she suffered a stroke. By October 2014, Martha was told by the state of Michigan that her application for welfare was denied—because her daughter wasn’t going to school.
“I checked my [benefits] card monthly to see how much I would have, and thought, Why is my amount less? Then I got a letter in the mail,” Martha told The Daily Beast. (She asked that she and her daughter be allowed to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy.)
Michigan kicked Martha, Lisa, and her two siblings off welfare. Thanks to a policy created by the department’s Republican-appointed director, the state can cut off households if their children are truant. The state Department of Health Services said 350 households have had assistance eliminated or reduced since 2012 as part of Michigan’s attempt to force welfare recipients to send their kids to class.
READ MORE: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/21/michigan-punishes-mom-for-her-daughter-s-brain-cancer.html