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."