Budget Cuts Threaten to Undermine GAIN : Welfare: The state’s ambitious education and training program is designed to end dependency by teaching job skills. A battle is shaping up to keep the money flowing.

Susan Ricci had been receiving welfare checks for so long that she wasn’t even thinking about a job the day she was ordered to report for California’s GAIN program, the state’s much-heralded mandatory education and job-training program for welfare recipients.

“I’ve never had a real job. I’ve either been married--or married to welfare,” said Ricci, a 38-year-old mother of three explaining that she had fallen into a welfare rut: hanging around the house, taking care of the kids and waiting for the checks to arrive the 1st and 15th of every month.

Now, classes financed by GAIN (Greater Avenues for Independence) at Sacramento City College have Ricci optimistic about finding a decent job. “The people who run the program get you believing in yourself. They give you a bucketful of confidence. I’m out there doing it now, not just sitting at home waiting for the 1st and 15th,” Ricci said.

Despite success stories like Ricci’s, Gov. George Deukmejian has proposed delaying full implementation of the program, which was scheduled to receive $373 million in the next fiscal year. Instead, Deukmejian would slice $91.6 million, leaving the program with about $10 million less than this year.

The cuts would deny job and education training to 164,000 welfare recipients. And that has Democrats pledging to fight to keep the GAIN budget whole. They say the ambitious program, now 4 years old, is just beginning to pay dividends.

Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Union City), who heads the Legislature’s Oversight Committee on GAIN Implementation, calls the proposed budget cut “a real tragedy. It means 164,000 people will remain on welfare without being offered basic education or job-training programs.”

Deukmejian Administration officials said the governor has not lost faith in the program. They explained that the governor, facing budget pressure from prisons, schools and legal requirements to support other health and welfare programs, simply had nowhere else to look for savings in putting together his new budget. They note that even with the budget cut, GAIN will still reach 273,000 recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

The fact that Eastin and other Democrats are among the program’s supporters illustrates the differences between GAIN and earlier so-called “workfare” programs, which required welfare recipients to work in return for their welfare checks.

Those programs were considered largely punitive in nature--an effort to discourage people from seeking or staying on welfare by putting them into difficult, often demeaning jobs rather than giving them training that could lead to more productive work.

There are some punitive elements to GAIN, which is limited to people in the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program. Recipients face reduced benefits if they do not work or attend classes.

But before taking a job, welfare recipients are sent to school until they receive at least the equivalent of a high school diploma--and maybe some kind of vocational training on top of that. They can be subsidized for up to two years at a community college. Those who do not speak English are sent to language classes.

The goal is to end welfare dependency by giving recipients solid skills that will keep them in the job market once they get there. To enhance the program and remove any obstacles to training, GAIN reimburses participants for transportation and child-care costs. Those kinds of benefits add significantly to the cost of the program, but have made GAIN one of the most innovative programs of its kind in the nation.

So far, state and local officials say, it is too early to judge GAIN’s effectiveness.

GAIN has been slow to get off the ground in some of the state’s larger counties--like Los Angeles, which has more than 30% of the state’s welfare caseload. Enacted in 1985, and begun in only a handful of counties in 1986, GAIN was not up and running in all 58 counties until last year.

About 205,000 people have registered with GAIN since 1986. As of last June, 50,000 GAIN participants had gotten jobs. But most of them earned such low pay, averaging about $6 an hour, that they still required some financial assistance. Only 14,400 of the GAIN graduates got off welfare completely--a drop in the bucket when measured against the roughly 678,000 adults receiving AFDC.

The Coalition of California Welfare Rights Organizations, a longtime opponent of GAIN, claims that the state paid $55,264 for each GAIN job that resulted in the termination of AFDC benefits.

The organization argues that GAIN differs little from more punitive versions of “workfare.” It claims that welfare recipients have been harassed, denied child-care benefits, threatened, and in some cases seen their benefits halted illegally.

Kevin M. Aslanian, a lobbyist for the welfare rights organization, contends that welfare recipients can find jobs quicker on their own than they do through GAIN. (Historically, the average stay for a person on welfare is 18 to 24 months, according to the Department of Social Services.)

“GAIN has prevented many people from going to work by forcing them to do it the social engineers’ way,” Aslanian argues. “It takes people’s independence away. It hurts children when their parents are sanctioned for not participating. The people who have really benefited are the workfare bureaucrats. They all have good jobs, nice offices.”

Defenders of the program note that it never was intended to include all AFDC recipients, only those who have been on the welfare rolls the longest. Parents with children under 3 years of age are exempted, as are those with disabilities or other problems that could keep them from working.

Budget and other problems also influence the relatively small number of people who have managed to get off welfare as a result of GAIN.

Los Angeles County, for example, which has a potential pool of 90,000 GAIN-eligible welfare recipients to draw from, has only about 9,000 now in the program.

Hampering Los Angeles County’s effort is the continuing controversy over a decision by the Board of Supervisors to contract with a private firm, Maximus, to run the county’s program. The Legislature, angry with the Maximus contract, retaliated by limiting the county’s funding.

But even without the ceiling imposed by the Legislature, Ray Garcia, the government relations director of the county’s Department of Social Services, said the county would have had enough money to handle only 20,000 recipients.

“It’s frustrating because after three years of setting up the program and laying all the groundwork, the money is not there,” Garcia said.

GAIN has also been beset by unrealistic budget projections. The state Department of Social Services originally estimated that 15% of the program’s participants would need remedial education. But once the actual testing of welfare recipients began, the figure jumped to nearly 60%. GAIN’s projected costs nearly doubled. The costs of putting each person through GAIN have jumped 130% in just about four years, according to the state legislative analyst’s office.

State Sen. Bill Greene (D-Los Angeles), one of the legislative leaders who pushed for enactment of the program in 1985, said the stakes are too high to back away from the program now. “I understand how tight money is, but this is a problem that has been haunting our society for eons,” said Greene, chairman of the Senate’s Industrial Relations Committee.

A huge dividend that cannot be measured, GAIN officials say, is the impact the various job-training and education programs are having not only on the adults, but on their children as well.

Jo Frederick, an aide to Assemblywoman Eastin who works on the GAIN legislative committee, said: “People on GAIN may be on AFDC for a longer stretch, but it is a good investment. They are going back to school, getting their high school equivalency degree, learning how to read, how to write, basic math, so that when they leave they stay off longer. We know it’s also rubbing off on their kids. They see mom studying at night, going to school, getting her pride and self esteem back, and it rubs off on them. We hope it will end two- and three-generation welfare families.”

Welfare recipient Ricci, who has been receiving AFDC payments for four years, agrees. “Everyone I know who has gone through the program, their lives are changing in a positive direction. It’s a good program,” she said.

She said the treatment she received from GAIN officials was sometimes harsh. “They really rub your nose in it. They say, ‘Look at you, you aren’t doing anything. Don’t you want to get off welfare?’ And then they teach you how.”

Ricci said the biggest change was in her self esteem. “No one can understand what it’s like to go into a supermarket and pay for your groceries with food stamps. It’s a humiliation. It’s an embarrassment, confirmation that you’re a failure. GAIN tries to turn that around. They want to talk about your strengths. They made me feel like a hotshot.”

One of her instructors at a Sacramento GAIN center was Dennis Kennedy, a 36-year-old veteran of numerous poverty programs who is working for the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency, a quasi-governmental agency that oversees the program for the county. His job is to motivate AFDC recipients like Ricci, something he does with a mixture of humor, hard-nosed advice and common-sense suggestions.

During a recent session at a Sacramento GAIN office, he told 12 AFDC recipients, 10 of them women, not to shoot themselves in the foot during job interviews by bringing up topics that could hurt their chances of getting a job. “If it works for you, then volunteer it. If it doesn’t, then don’t use it. If you have a dirty sock in the closet and friends come over, you don’t wave it in their face, do you?” he lectured.

“When they first show up, there is a lot of resistance,” Kennedy said. “They are so beaten down. They come with low self esteem. People have told them they are dumb over and over and over again to where they believe it.”

Kennedy said the skills his students use to stay on welfare “surpass those required of a lot of jobs.”

“They are dealing with a bureaucratic system that is pretty extreme. They may have to report to 10 different people. What’s more, they are asked questions like who did they sleep with last night, how long did that take, was anybody watching. Pretty degrading stuff. I say, ‘Well, an employer only wants you to go to work, do your job and that’s it. They don’t care who you slept with . . . and you get paid a lot better.”