School Aide Angela Felix loves children. Her job is to watch over youngsters in a crowded lunchroom, keeping a headcount and reassuring her charges. After work, she’s mother to four and surrogate mom to “countless kids on the block.”

When the school she worked in for six years was shuttered, redeployment to Community School 47 in the Bronx gave her hope. Then she was evicted from her apartment in a private house near Gun Hill Road.

Homeless since April, Angela and her youngest two children, 3 and 9, were living in a Queens shelter when the mayor announced drastic job cuts to close the 2004 budget gap. As rumors of layoffs hovered like storm clouds, she gathered her children and stood with co-workers April 29 among the 30,000 DC 37 members at the union’s City Hall Rally.

“I’m really upset,” said Ms. Felix. “I need my job. It’s all I have to feed my kids.”

Angela Felix, a member of Dept. of Education Employees Local 372, is in a daily struggle to keep her job and family intact. Like thousands of municipal employees, she believed her city job promised stability. They were disabused of that dream as the mayor’s first round of layoffs hit 2,000 city workers — half from DC 37 — and the jobs they dedicated their lives to were snatched away.

While New York City is home to more millionaires than any other, the city’s response to the worst fiscal crisis since the 1970s is crushing working families. A transit fare hike, service cuts and layoffs widen the chasm between rich and poor. And Angela Felix teeters on the edge.

In a cramped apartment shared by 10 people, her two youngest children slept on a twin mattress while she took the floor. “I was always the one my family looked to for help, now I can’t even buy my daughters an ice,” Ms. Felix said wearily. Spared from the first round of cuts, her future is uncertain as thousands more layoffs loom in the school system. The family now lives in a single shelter room with two bunk beds, a table, three chairs and no kitchen. Meals are served on a schedule that conflicts with her two-hour early morning commute. At night they often go hungry again.

“My son visits from college, he has to stay with friends or sleep in his car,” Ms. Felix said. Still, her son, who’s on the dean’s list of an upstate college, sends home part of his financial aid to help out. Ms. Felix does not qualify for welfare.
“Why is the mayor going after the people who are struggling to live in this city?” she asked.

For her children’s sake, Ms. Felix longs for a return to normalcy. “I pray we can be a family again. I pray the mayor will let us keep our jobs. Why can’t he let us shine and laugh like normal people? This is our city too.”

— Diane S. Williams