Wilson Takes Campaign to School : Budget: The governor touts his plan for ‘preventive’ health programs for children. Critics say his proposed welfare cuts would harm the youngsters.

As Gov. Pete Wilson surrounded himself with poor children Friday to try to gain attention for a new health program he is backing, Bill Camp watched with disdain.

Camp, a longtime Democratic activist who is president of the Sacramento city school board, wonders what this Republican governor, who says children are his top priority, has in mind.

Nine of 10 children at Maple Elementary School in south Sacramento, where Wilson visited, are poor enough to qualify for a subsidized lunch, and nearly half are dependent on the state’s biggest welfare program--Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Wilson wants to cut their welfare benefits by as much as 25%, or $150 a month for a family of three. But that was not what he was touting during his tour of the school. Instead, it was his proposal to use the money saved by the welfare cuts to help pay for “preventive” health programs targeted at children and designed to guide them into a productive, taxpaying adulthood. This approach, Wilson argues, is not only more humane but makes good fiscal sense.

This competition among state government programs--which to save, which to jettison--will be at the center of the debate as the Legislature considers a $60.2-billion budget Wilson proposed Thursday. The governor’s budget would fully fund higher enrollments for public education and growing prison inmate populations while cutting health and welfare benefits to the poor. It includes no new general taxes.

Camp, speaking to reporters before Wilson arrived, said the governor’s welfare proposal would hurt the very children he says he wants to help.

“The welfare cut is going to have a devastating impact on these kids,” he said. “You’re taking the shoes off their feet, the coats off their backs. Their mothers aren’t going to be able to pay the rent and they’ll have to move.”

Already, said Camp and the school’s principal, Joseph Bernal, Maple Elementary has tremendous turnover, with the equivalent of the entire school enrollment moving in or out every academic year. The school will start and end the year with about 300 children. But in between, nearly 600 pupils will have been enrolled at one time or another.

“It’s very disruptive to their education,” Camp said.

Camp says the problem is poverty. Poor mothers and their children, abandoned by their fathers, cannot make the rent and are evicted. Others move into the neighborhood for a month or two but cannot make ends meet and move on. Cutting the money they use to pay the rent and buy other essentials is only going to make matters worse, he said.

Wilson rejects criticism of his budget proposals by insisting that the state’s welfare program represents good intentions gone awry. He says the payments, which he considers generous, are encouraging people to remain on assistance rather than take a job. Now, a parent--mostly mothers--and two children on AFDC receive $663 a month.

Wilson adds that unless he raises taxes, an approach he has rejected this year, there is not enough money to continue all the programs the state now offers. He believes he must take with one hand even as he gives with the other.

“Any budget requires that you make choices, that you set priorities,” Wilson said after helping to prepare about a dozen poor children for vision tests funded by a new program that uses state, local, federal and private funds. “What we are bound and determined to achieve in California is a shift from the remedial to the preventive mode.”

By remedial, Wilson has said that he means programs that aid those who already are disadvantaged. The state should focus instead, he said, on preventing those problems that put people in need--teen-age pregnancy, dropping out of school and drug abuse. Because resources are limited, he cannot bolster prevention without cutting the remedial programs, Wilson said.

“We’re saying the choice required is one we don’t enjoy but one that is necessary,” he said. “We have made the choice. I think it’s the right choice.”

But Camp, and many Democrats in the Legislature, say Wilson has wrongly framed the choice as one between education and welfare, prevention and remediation. Camp said he fully supports the governor’s agenda on prevention. He just wants him to pay for it another way: by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy.

“It’s not these kids who should be paying for the fact that the economy has gone to hell in a hand basket,” Camp said. “They didn’t pick their parents.”