New Welfare Rules Are Bad News for Day Care : Children: Order to parents to get ready for work means county child-care system, well over capacity already, must find room for thousands more youngsters. Many of them are infants and preschoolers.

New state and federal programs requiring welfare parents to prepare for employment may mean up to 6,700 children will be added to an already overloaded day-care delivery system in Orange County, according to the Orange County Social Services Agency.

The parents--recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children--are targets of two demanding and controversial plans to bring long-term welfare dependents, most of them single mothers, back into the work force.

So far, the state program, Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), has reached 5,624 of the county’s 19,000 welfare parents, telling them their welfare grants will be cut if they do not participate. Starting last month, an additional 3,500 will be phased into the program as a result of new rules from a similar national program--the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) portion of the 1988 Family Support Act.

The new group is significant because, for the first time, it includes parents of preschool children and, in some cases, infants.

According to the GAIN report, the increase “will create a demand for child care in Orange County that is already not available.”

In Santa Ana, for example, there are 1,440 children whose parents are mandated to enter the program, but only 614 licensed day-care vacancies in the city, according to the agency’s 1989-90 GAIN plan update.

The situation is similar in Anaheim, Garden Grove, Westminster, Fullerton and Buena Park, and even more dire in South County, social workers said.

“I don’t know where we’re going to put all these children,” said Nancy Claxton, director of children’s services for the Orange County Department of Education. “Our existing child-care delivery system absolutely cannot accommodate the number of children that will be required to come into the system. It just won’t work.”

GAIN is “a joke” in the day-care field, she said. “We call it Greater Avenues to Insanity.”

In an effort to solve the problem, county officials have paid $257,000 to Children’s Home Society, a private nonprofit resource and referral agency, to develop 591 new child-care slots as well as to help GAIN clients find openings after they are off AFDC.

But so far, the Children’s Home Society has been able to create only 150 new spaces, said Jan Hutchins, Children’s Home Society program manager. More than 2,500 GAIN children have been placed on waiting lists for subsidized child care, she said.

Those lists already include more than 5,000 children, some who have priority because they were referred by protective services, Claxton said.

Jerry Dunn, GAIN planning manager, said the program is relying on the gradual phasing in of parents with young children to avoid flooding the day-care market. He said he did not know how long the phase-in period would take.

“The way GAIN is put together, we want to make sure an individual’s child-care needs are met,” he said. “Up to this point, it looks good.”

GAIN officials point to other child-care incentives built into the $7.5-million program:

* GAIN will pay $81 to $120 a week for day care of the parents’ choice--even to a relative--while welfare dependents are receiving education and job training.

* When they leave welfare, they can receive 12 months of “transitional child care” subsidies as well as medical insurance.

“We’re getting them in a position where they can be self-sufficient,” Dunn said. “From there, they’ve got to take their cues and go.”

Sixty percent of welfare recipients resist efforts to bring them into the program. But for some, the offer of subsidized child care is enough to make them volunteer.

Kristen Noble, 22, a single father of 8-month-old twins and a 4-year-old, said, “I couldn’t wait to get on the GAIN program so they can help me.” Noble said he dropped out of high school to care for his first child and has collected welfare for four months after being laid off as a linen worker at UCI Medical Center. He said child care was the main reason he entered the program in which he will learn copy machine repair.

He said he pays $70 a week for his 4-year-old’s preschool and so far relies on his sister to baby-sit the twins.

Most mandatory GAIN clients have not even used day care, relying instead on friends or relatives to watch their children, according to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, independent evaluators of the program. However, the evaluation did not address mandatory participants with preschool children, he said.

Most authorities agree that using relatives is a short-term solution. “They may have a relative or friend willing to care for the child part time while going to remedial education or something like that,” Dunn said. “As they progress and leave remediation and go on to other components that require more hours of participation, you may have a relative who says, ‘I can’t do it for that many hours.’ ”

But critics like Claxton fear the new working parents will be trapped in a Catch 22--forced to leave the ranks of the welfare poor to join the working poor in an affluent area.

In Orange County, the average starting wage for GAIN participants is $7.24 an hour while day care averages $250 a month per child and can run as high as $625 a month for infants.

“It’s almost like throwing them to the wolves,” Claxton said.

Once off welfare and “transitional care,” some parents will make other arrangements. Some school-age children will simply be left alone, “so we’ll have an increase in latchkey children,” Claxton predicted.

In addition, “we do know some elementary and junior high students have been kept out of school to provide child care,” she said.

“There’s this assumption by policy-makers that once someone is trained and has a job that gets them off welfare, they’re going to be able to make it without other financial assistance. That’s simply not true,” she said.

Other counties have reported that many GAIN mothers were forced to leave new jobs because they could not find affordable child care when their initial subsidies ran out, according to a report last year by the state Joint Select Task Force on the Changing Family. Without their welfare cushion, and in some cases without access to medical care, the families were left in “an even more vulnerable position,” the report said.

In South County, the absence of affordable day care has already delayed some welfare mothers from entering the program, social workers said.

A 32-year-old single mother in Dana Point, who lives on a $560 monthly welfare check, said she put off starting school under the GAIN program for two months while seeking day care for her 3-year-old son.

“A lot were already full and didn’t have any spots,” she said. Others were reluctant to accept the GAIN subsidy, which is paid only once a month rather than weekly.