THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 20, 1996 TAG: 9605200135
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Welfare Reform
SOURCE: BY MARGARET EDDS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CULPEPER LENGTH: Long : 248 lines
In the spring of 1998, a time clock will start ticking for welfare recipients in South Hampton Roads. One of the toughest state reforms in the nation will require most to work if they want benefits. After two years, the checks will stop. Last July, a group of women in Culpeper and a few neighboring counties became the first in the state to enter the welfare-to-work program. The Virginian-Pilot is following three of them through the two year period before welfare ends. Their fate is a clue to the future of hundreds of local women.
Denise Fletcher's dreams of a better life are focused on a spartan brick school building about 15 miles outside town.
In the cosmetology program of the George Washington Carver-Piedmont Technical Education Center, the 31-year-old mother of five hopes to find escape from an adulthood of dependency on welfare and wayward men.
``It's talents wrapped up in me I know I can do,'' says Fletcher, fixing a listener with deep-set, earnest brown eyes.
Some weeks ago, a friend told Denise about the program and gave her the name of an administrator to call. She did. The man called back. He told her about summer and fall classes and suggested that she come over for an interview.
A month has passed. Fletcher still hasn't stopped by the Piedmont Technical Center. Work, sickness, children and a move from her uncle's house to her own rental home intervened. Any day now, she said, she expects to get the paperwork moving.
In the welfare-to-work program that has thrust Virginia into the forefront of national welfare reform, there is little hand-holding. Mirroring the everyday world, women are expected to look for jobs if they are unemployed and to find a way to couple that work with education or training if they are unskilled.
Extra help is available for transportation and day care. Those who find jobs lose less of their welfare checks than they used to. Social workers are available to talk about strategies.
But fundamentally, the onus is on the women themselves to summon up the gumption they will need to live when their welfare benefits run out after two years.
``Denise needs to walk in the door and say, `This is what I want to do.' Not Chip Coleman walk in the door and tell her, `This is what you ought to do,' '' says Coleman, who is the director of social services in Culpeper County, one of the first Virginia localities brought into the welfare-to-work plan.
No single controversy in the welfare reform debate generates more heat than whether poor women should be put straight to work or educated and trained first. Is escape from the public dole more likely to be found in a classroom or behind a fast-food grill?
The operative theory in Virginia since welfare reform was launched in July 1995 in Culpeper and a few neighboring localities is that work experience comes first. Women are expected to search for jobs and take any suitable work that is offered.
Education is allowed, but in no instance can it replace work altogether. It is, advocates say, the same principle followed by thousands of low-income men and women who struggle to get by without welfare. Critics counter that it is unrealistic to expect most welfare mothers to be self-sufficient in two years if they're unqualified for more than a minimum-wage job.
In Denise Fletcher's case, donning a Burger King uniform last summer also meant that she stopped work on her G.E.D. high school equivalency diploma. Her social services worker advised Denise to keep studying. She could maintain a couple of class sessions along with a work schedule of 30 or so hours a week, the worker believed.
But Fletcher, who dropped out of school in the 11th grade and hadnever held a sustained job, worried about spending little time with her five daughters. Four of the five were fathered by the man from whom she is divorced.
Fletcher found the idea of both days and nights away from home overwhelming. ``I've got beautiful little girls,'' she said soon after starting work last summer. ``The hard part is that I'm not with my kids.''
Deborah Taliaferro and Michelle Wallner haven't been steered toward educational or training programs either. Both women already have high school degrees. Again, the emphasis is on getting them off Aid to Families With Dependent Children through work.
In Taliaferro's case, that means ``community work experience,'' a euphemism for a public sector job created for a client unable to land a private sector one. A recovering addict with felony drug convictions, she was sanctioned last winter for failing to complete job searches required by the reform plan. Her food stamps and $207 per month in AFDC benefits were cut off.
Then in March a friend offered a way out that seemed almost too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was. For two weeks, Taliaferro commuted with the friend to an office outside Washington where she worked in a charitable and political fund-raising phone bank. In the second week, supervisors said they were unsatisfied with her speed.
They suggested switching to another department, but the hours didn't fit with her ride. Taliaferro does not drive. ``I felt kind of bad about it at first, but I've gotten over it,'' she said. ``It was experience, something to put on my resume.''
With her utilities and rent unpaid, she got back in touch with Social Services. She resumed searching for work, was enrolled in ``community work experience,'' and again began collecting an AFDC check. Her new, 32-hour-a-week job is cleaning the welfare office.
Taliaferro, who alternately appears exuberant and withdrawn, joked recently about her new status. ``At first, I didn't like the idea at all. Me? Cleaning offices? I don't think so,'' she said. But now that she has adjusted to the routine, ``it's not so bad.''
``It's the people here,'' she added. ``I've grown quite attached to quite a few of them.''
Taliaferro's arrangement will continue for at least several months. Then, if she has still not found private-sector work, there may be a greater push to get her into a training program pegged to employment.
``It's crossed my mind, but I'm not dwelling on it,'' she says of the future. ``It's too scary.''
Michelle Wallner has been charting her own course through welfare reform. Behind on her required job searches, she lost her AFDC check and food stamps last October. Even when she found a job on her own at a local convenience store and began working, Wallner made no attempt to get AFDC reinstated.
She did make a half-hearted attempt to renew the food stamps. Her failure to follow through seems to reflect half spunky independence, half disorganization.
``I've gone this long without it. I might as well just keep on going without it,'' Wallner said. ``As long as I don't need it, it's money for someone else who does.''
For now, she is making do on the $60 a week she gets for baby-sitting her roommate's son. She limits expenses by sharing space in a farmhouse owned by her roommate's family. Her boyfriend helps out some.
In recent weeks, her focus has been on the delivery of a 7-pound, 6 1/2-ounce son on March 29. Zachary Daniel, the unexpected result of a brief fling with an old boyfriend, was placed with a family in a private adoption soon after his birth.
Cheerily, Wallner whips out the latest photos mailed from his adoptive mother. She grins, then sobers. ``It hit me a week later. Poor Sara, I unloaded on her one night,'' she says, referring to her roommate.
Wallner does not appear to doubt her decision. ``It was hard,'' she said of giving up her son. But she was stretched to her financial and emotional limit by caring for 4-year-old Devon. ``It was something I had to do.''
Her planning is short-term. She has stopped work and expects to stay home for the summer. This fall, she's hoping for a job with the Head Start program Devon attends. More education or training might be nice, she says. But she already owes money for a business college program she started and stopped a while back.
New endeavors will have to wait.
Denise Fletcher feels she's been waiting too long for a chance to prove her skill at cosmetology.
For months, she's been telling social workers of her interest. They have not been encouraging.
The fear, said Pam Riley, the woman who oversees Fletcher's case, is that hair-styling won't provide sufficient income for a woman and five children when her AFDC benefits are cut off in July 1997.
``We still feel that way. She has a good-size family to support, but it's her dream,'' said Riley, explaining the department's gradual acceptance of her pursuit.
``Now that they see I'm not backing off, they're getting more encouraged,'' Fletcher said.
More than at any time in the past year, Fletcher says she is starting to glimpse a brighter future. The changes are tenuous, but positive. She's gotten a 15-cents-per-hour raise at work, up to $4.80 an hour. She received an income tax return of about $1,000, enough for a new television and VCR, some clothes for the girls and about $400 in savings.
She's ecstatic about the move to her small, white farm bungalow. She's making the $420-a-month payments on her own, with the combination of $403 a month in AFDC payments and several hundred in take-home pay. And, conscious of colors and style, she's even proud that Burger King has new uniforms in periwinkle and midnight blue with a turquoise stripe.
The next step is to travel those 15 miles to Piedmont Tech. Then there will be the matters of tuition and altered work schedules and adjusted baby-sitting times. No one is going to make those arrangements for her. ``She needs to make a commitment,'' says Coleman. ``She needs to tell us that's what she's going to do.'' MEMO: Critics question emphasis of work over education
One year after the 1995 Virginia legislature passed an historic
overhaul of Aid to Families With Dependent Children, legislative critics
tried to undo some of the handiwork. Their target? Provisions that put
work ahead of education.
A proposal to let women who are enrolled fulltime in education or job
training study rather than work sailed through the House. It died on a
close vote in the Senate. Critics of the new law intend to fight another
year.
"What better way to get people off welfare than education," said Del.
Ken Melvin, D-Norfolk. "It makes no sense for the exemption not to be
there."
The architects of Virginia's welfare reform plan believe otherwise.
Welfare recipients can get training the way thousands of other Americans
do - at night, on weekends, or while juggling work schedules, they say.
For now, that theory is the one that counts. Under the welfare reform
law, most AFDC recipients are expected to work in the two years before
their benefits run out. Work can take one of three forms: private sector
employment, government subsidized employment, or community work
experience.
The rules involving education and training vary according to the type
of employment, but in every circumstance, women are expected to do some
work if a job exists. Ironically, critics of the system say, a woman who
finds a minimum wage job may not get any training, while one who is less
successful at finding work could wind up in an education program.
There appears to be substantial leaway in how individual social
services departments are interpreting and administering the rules on
education. In Culpeper, for instance, most recipients are expected to
work up to 30 or so hours a week in the first year if they can find a
job. In the second year, administrators are willing to cut back work
hours in favor of education.
But a state social services official said local offices have the
option of requiring only 8 hours of private sector work if it appears
likely that enrolling in an education program will lead to a job in two
years.
Steve Meyers, attorney for the Virginia Poverty Law Center, applauded
that interpretation but questioned it. His reading of the law, he said,
is that women who are offered up to 30 hours of work have to take the
job, regardless of whether they'd rather be in school.
ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
BILL TIERNAN photos
The Virginian-Pilot
Deborah Taliaferro
Age: 40
Children: A son, 8, and a daughter, 16
The Story So Far: Limited by several drug related convictions and
little work experience, Deborah has had a tough time finding a job.
In March, a friend helped her link up with a telephone solicitation
firm. Deborah, whose AFDC benefits had stopped due to failure to
comply with the welfare reform law, was ecstatic but apprehensive
about the change. Her children's father is in prison.
Denise Fletcher:
Age: 31
Children: Five daughters, ranging in age from 3 to 12.
The Story So Far:
Fletcher, who is divorced, began working last summer at a Burger
King in Culpeper. It is her first sustained job. She has been living
with her uncle to make ends meet, but she has been hoping for a
place of her own. She receives a small amount of child support from
her former husband, and is allowed to keep both AFDC benefits and
her full wages because of the size of her family.
Michelle Wallner:
Age:24
Children: A daughter, 4.
The Story So Far:
Wallner, a high school graduate, has collected no AFDC or food
stamps since last October when she was sanctioned for failing to
file proper job search forms. Since then, she found a job at a local
convenience store, but has not reapplied for public support. She is
in touch with her daughter's father, who lives in New Jersey. but
has been unsuccessful in collecting child support.
KEYWORDS: WELFARE REFORM by CNB