February 27, 2002 Wednesday SOONER EDITION Correction Appended
SECTION: EDITORIAL,
Pg.A-15
LENGTH: 1297 words
HEADLINE: HOW WELFARE REFORM WORKED HERE; ON SUNDAY,
THE CLOCK TICKS DOWN ON THE FIVE-YEAR EXPERIMENT. LOCALLY, THE RESULTS ARE
IMPRESSIVE
BODY: When the five-year
welfare reform alarm clock goes off this Sunday, no one in Allegheny County will
immediately be pushed off welfare.
That nonevent
signals for Allegheny County one of its great, unheralded success stories.
It started in 1997 when the welfare reform provisions
passed the year before by Congress took effect in Pennsylvania. Originally
launched by President Clinton's 1992 campaign promise to "end welfare as we know
it" and passed by a Republican Congress, the new law abolished Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC) and established Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families (TANF). Welfare rights advocates and many liberals were aghast and many
bitterly opposed it.
The Pittsburgh community took a
different tack, thanks at first to Claire Morrison, then head of the county
office of the state Department of Public Welfare. She took a twofold positive
approach: (1) It's the law and let's make it succeed and (2) let's not assume
that welfare mothers don't want to work if given a proper opportunity. Morrison
was able to mobilize Pittsburgh employers, job-training institutions,
philanthropic foundations, Public Welfare caseworkers and welfare clients
themselves to make TANF work.
Moreover, the private
Pittsburgh Foundation launched its "Gaps" program, a series of local projects
and studies designed to help welfare recipients bridge the gap between
dependence on welfare and self-sufficiency.
Overall,
Allegheny County's experience is bound to be significant for Congress as this
year it approaches the next step -- reauthorization of the 1996 act.
All this has been in contrast with Philadelphia, where
nonprofit agencies and welfare rights groups bucked and stalled on TANF. Only
lately has that major city scrambled to catch up.
*
The result in Allegheny County is that a TANF caseload of
18,657 families (52,117 persons) in 1997 now five years later has been whittled
down to 9,720 (25,784 persons), according to state Public Welfare figures.
Timothy Cornell, Morrison's successor, explains that of that number, 2,000 are
children living with grandmothers or other relatives and thus not affected by
the rule that mothers can't stay on welfare more than 60 months -- the so-called
five-year "clock" that runs out Sunday. Moreover, many of the remaining 6,000
are included in the so-called "carve-out" exempt category, a recognition by
Congress that because of "multiple barrier" disabilities -- mental illness, for
example, or addiction -- not everyone on welfare was employable.
Cornell says that those not included in those categories either are in
special training programs or will be placed in them and, therefore, will not
lose their cash benefits Sunday. However, of another 1,400 families scheduled to
hit the "clock" limit by the end of this year, many are in the multiple-barriers
category. So they will be put in special programs, such as treatment, and not
lose their cash payments.
The cash benefits are as
follows: Two persons in a household (say, a mother and child), $316 a month,
Three in a household, $403. Four, $497. Five, $589. Six, $670. For each person
above six, an additional $83.
When clients go off
welfare, they lose only their cash payments. Food stamps, medical care, child
care, federal earned income tax credit and job-training possibilities continue.
But ex-welfare clients have to apply for them, and one of the questions brought
out in evaluations is how much Public Welfare caseworkers push that fact with
their clients. The state is worried about the ever-climbing cost of medical
assistance (Medicaid), so there may be a conflict of interest over saving state
tax dollars by keeping quiet about that.
A major
portion of that large drop in the welfare rolls came at the beginning. One
supposition is that many clients secretly had jobs that they didn't want to
jeopardize by fulfilling TANF's 20-hours-a week job or training
requirement. Also, many women shrewdly decided to save "clock" time for a real
emergency.
The biggest drop in the rolls came in the
first two years -- 126,000 statewide (37 percent of the original 481,099 before
the clock started on March 3, 1997). The state's caseload now is 88,020 (231,605
persons). Philadelphia County's remains the biggest, from 72,711 (212,615
persons) in 1997 down now to 41,593 (114,207 persons).
An important part of the local story has been the Gaps program, led by
the Pittsburgh Foundation's Gerri Kay and Annette Green. Beverly Lovelace, who
died last April, was the program's architect. Its premise was that if progress
under welfare-to-work was to be permanent, the women involved would need the
kind of help that was not available under the customary welfare-system model.
Lovelace asserted the need for involving community groups close to the clients
who would choose local residents to be "hand-holding" caseworkers with them. The
agencies selected were Hill House, Neighborhood Centers Association, Rankin
Christian Center and the Urban League.
The three-year
Gaps study turned the spotlight not only on problems facing women moving off
welfare but also on those facing the working poor in general. Examples:
Availability of good child care and access to it. Transportation to where the
jobs are. Continued medical insurance. And the need for cash help in certain
emergencies, such as replacing a dead car battery that jeopardizes meeting a
work requirement. Some of these lessons were taken to heart by Public Welfare,
resulting in policy changes.
With the 1996 law
expiring, what should Congress do next? That has been the subject of three
roundtable discussions held by the Institute of Politics at the University of
Pittsburgh, involving representatives of relevant government and nonprofit
agencies. A summary of recommendations: (1) Recognize the value of formal
education by allowing it to be a "work activity" under TANF; (2) emphasize
poverty reduction by offering incentives for employers, unions and nonprofit
organizations to provide continuing education for entry-level workers; (3)
include provisions for affordable, quality child care, as well as transportation
to jobs; and (4) enhance coordination among government departments so the left
hand will know what the right hand is doing, including reassessing
confidentiality requirements. Finally, there is a renewed recognition of the
father in the home, with questions about whether the present child-custody
system -- with payments deducted from the welfare check -- drives wedges between
the father and the children.
A fuller account of these
findings will appear in a forthcoming "Issues Brief" monograph to be published
by the Institute of Politics.
I am aware that talking
about success overlooks the pain many families have had. To me, the record --
and particularly the Gaps findings -- point to the problems facing not just
welfare clients but the working poor in general. I think these will keep alive
at the national level such issues as universal health coverage and, at the local
level, the Living Wage campaign.
But in regard to
welfare reform itself, I found two comments by Public Welfare's Timothy Cornell
particular reasons for satisfaction. One element concerns caseworkers who, at
first, were apprehensive about what welfare reform could mean for their jobs.
Now, with all the evidence of the importance of "hand-holding" counseling in
helping people get and keep jobs, they find they are doing what as idealistic
young people entering the social welfare field they had hoped to do, rather than
just watchdogging clients' behavior.
Quite as
significant, Cornell says, is the heartening experience at meetings of hearing
ex-TANF women testify proudly, "I was on welfare and now I work."
NOTES: Clarke
Thomas is a Post-Gazette senior editor.
CORRECTION-DATE: March 1, 2002
CORRECTION: The last name of Pittsburgh Foundation
program officer Gerri Kay was misspelled in Clarke Thomas' Feb. 27 column, "How
Welfare Reform Worked Here."
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